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Take no false comfort, The Economist warns of the coming oil price spike.

I have been arguing since the fall that we are experiencing but a lull; the long term trends and short term pressures contributing to oil's remarkable rise in 2008 remain firmly in place. The Economist lays out the argument in a succinct and comprehensive manner:

The explanation is simple. Oilmen are worried because they believe that many of the factors behind the record-breaking ascent last year remain in place. Much of the world’s “easy” oil has already been extracted, or is in the hands of nationalist governments that will not allow foreigners to exploit it. That leaves firms to hunt for new reserves in ever more inhospitable and inaccessible places, such as the deep waters off Africa or the frozen oceans of the Arctic. Such fields take a long time and a lot of expensive technology to develop. Worse, new discoveries tend to be smaller than in the past and to run dry faster.

So oil firms must work doubly hard to replace declining fields and to increase output. As Francisco Blanch of Merrill Lynch puts it, they must find another Saudi Arabia’s worth of oil every two years just to maintain their production at today’s levels. Yet the oil industry is short of equipment and manpower, thanks to decades of underinvestment in the 1980s and 1990s, when prices were low. That left it struggling to expand despite the strong price signal of recent years, and thus poorly positioned to cater to vast new markets in the developing world, including China and India, where oil consumption has been growing fast. At the height of the boom, with the price repeatedly setting records, production outside OPEC even fell.

As soon as the world economy starts growing again, the theory runs, demand for oil will once again outstrip the industry’s ability to supply it. The seemingly ample cushion of inventories and spare capacity will quickly be exhausted, sending prices soaring. In other words, the global recession has only interrupted the “supercycle” of which many analysts used to speak, during which the normal boom-and-bust cycle of oil and other commodities would give way to a protracted period of high prices, as ever-growing demand from emerging markets swallowed everything the extractive industries could produce. “The commodity supercycle is not over, just resting,” says Mr Blanch.

It is important to note that a number of factors can help mitigate this super-cycle: technological innovation, cap and trade and fuel efficiency standards in the world's largest and emerging economies, a prolonged demand slump in the developed world, the conversion of vehicles and mass transportation systems to natural gas, to name but a few. But the underlying demand, reserve and production trends will sustain oil's steady rise.

The Great Supply Crunch is coming.