Goldman Sachs recently forecasted that oil would be at $141 a barrel by the end of the year, and rising to $200 a barrel in the not too distant future. I have seen other forecasts calling for oil to slip significantly under $100 a barrel before starting yet another bull market.

I have written for years that we are not going to run out of oil or energy, just cheap oil. I was just in South Africa, where much of their gas and diesel comes from coal gasification. At one time this was an expensive way to make gas, and South Africans had to pay more for their gas than the rest of the world. Now, it is getting close to "par" to the cost of gas in the US, and is cheaper than gas in Europe.

In this week's Outside the Box, my friend David Galland at Casey Research presents some very troubling thoughts on why oil may rise higher than we think in the next few years. Many of the countries from which the US gets its oil are seeing production fall, not rise. Some of it is political ineptitude, but much of it is from oil production peaking.

Yes, we can move to coal gasification, and the US has centuries of coal for such purposes, but building such plants takes time and capital and political will, the latter of which is in short supply. In the meantime, and until we get a full-blown crisis, oil is going to continue on its path to $200 and higher. But such a rise will not only make gasoline prices higher, it will make a host of new technologies competitive for the first time. The shift in how we make energy is inevitable.

As a quick aside, if we would start a project to build a massive nuclear infrastructure, such as in France, which produces 80% of its energy from nuclear, while at the same time pushing ahead in a Manhattan-type project the development of electric cars (or some hybrid), we could reduce our dependence on foreign oil and lower travel costs by the middle to the end of the next decade. And the environment would be cleaner and safer.

We are headed to such a future. It would be nice if we did it sooner rather than wait for a real crisis. But in the meantime, the price of oil is going to rise and opportunities for investors will rise along with it. My friends at Casey Research publish an excellent newsletter highlighting the opportunities not just in exploration companies but in all manner of energy-related firms. As David writes:

"The good news is that there are no shortage of high-quality energy-related investments available ... in coal, heavy oil, LNG, photovoltaics, natural gas consolidators, "run of river" hydroelectric, uranium and small to mid-cap oil companies with the potential for significant near-term gains in reserves or production."

They have agreed to give my readers a risk-free three-month trial to the Casey Energy Speculator. If you like the research you read below and want more of it, you can click on this link and subscribe.

And now let's see one of the main reasons why the price of oil is going up.