In between the instant decisions of traders in futures markets and the long-term prognoses of geologists about ultimate oil supply, managers within the oil industry are concerned mainly with the medium run – the rest of this century, and a decade or so into the next. When looking that far forward, they are never short of learned advice.

In June 1991, an International Energy Workshop held in Vienna brought together a poll of projections regarding prospects for oil and energy in general as far as the first or second decade of next century, made by sixty governmental, business and academic organisations across the world. This was the tenth time since 1981 that similar informal workshops had compiled such samplings of what the world's oil analysts were predicting. Over a decade of surprises, their sequence of results has provided a barometric record of changing climates of opinion within or close to this business. The IEW polls have often included the two intergovernmental organisations most directly concerned with the international oil trade. In 1991 Opec did take part. IEA, as it happened, had not done so since 1988, but published its own fully detailed projections in April 1991.

The Vienna workshop of 1991 did not produce any broad consensus of oil projections for the nineties. That might perhaps be taken as fortunate for everyone concerned. As Professor Edith Penrose once put it, ‘Never…has an oil industry consensus turned out to be correct.’ For that matter, the ten-year record from earlier workshops had seldom produced anything that could really be called a consensus.