COMMENT Little more than a month ago the suggestion that Russian troops would be engaged in a shooting war in Georgia leading to the closure of the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline would have triggered a dramatic rise in oil prices. A barrel of crude was already trading at more than $140 and the loss of another million barrels a day of supply could have pushed the figure on and up towards the $200 predicted by some banks and by the chief executive of Gazprom.
In fact prices are almost 20 per cent below their July peak. The fall has come despite a month of assertive Russian nationalism, whose victims to date include not just Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s president, but also Robert Dudley, chief executive of TNK-BP, who has been forced into exile in an undisclosed central European location. Other problems also persist – including civil conflict in Nigeria and the failure of the Maliki government in Iraq to agree on the legal structure through which international companies can invest in new oil developments.
