there&#x27;s probably a few things going on:<p>1. strategic decisions to keep the price low (in some cases below the cost of production) to make it uneconomic for competitors to invest in oil projects<p>2. time lags in the system. e.g. the global economy went into recession the last time the oil price spiked. that&#x27;d reduce oil demand in some cases. now as prices are much lower again we might expect demand to keep growing until supply isn&#x27;t able to satisfy demand (again), then the price will spike again<p>3. (long term trend) oil is becoming genuinely more costly (in physical terms - i.e. required energy) to extract as we deplete the low hanging fruit. i guess this makes it much harder &#x2F; impossible for supply to ramp up and satisfy demand in a short enough time period before another recession is triggered. this isn&#x27;t necessarily a problem in itself but perhaps it influences the behaviour in item 2<p>This is probably only semi-coherent. I read the &quot;limits to growth&quot; book a couple of weeks ago, and one of the claims there (from a system dynamics perspective) was roughly that any system that combines both delays in feedback and erodible limits is expected to either behave like &quot;overshoot and oscillation&quot; or &quot;overshoot and collapse&quot;.