Charles,
I am glad you found what you were looking for. Sorry about all the bantering, it always seems to happen in forums, it starts off as one thing and moves to an entirely different subject.
Tim, I was not saying that you should not comment. I was putting enough time and consideration into my post that it probably crossed some replies. I think we were having a civil discourse of the issues, and I enjoy your posts also. We also discussed in the course of this discussion the effect of headlines. I also believe that there are those out there who track peoples opinions of whether the price of oil will rise or fall. If enough people talk down the price of oil it will go down. If enough people talk up the price of oil it will go up. I think the price of oil is within tolerance of where it should be right now. I also believe that people who are talking about a drop in price, without effectively saying why could have a deleterious effect on the value of mine and others property. If you just want to go by a graph of the oil price from the past, why not use a graph of world population, go back a couple of decades and start postulating a population crash since in the past there were not as many people as there are today? Yes, I take the graph into account, I just don't give it as much weight as some do. Like in the old solicitations to invest in stocks/funds the disclaimer says, past performance is not a guarantee of future results. I guess that I replied because the mention of possible precipitous drop in the price of oil was no part of the OP's question and it sounded like more industry flack to bring down prices of mineral interests thereby increasing profits. I don't think you are the bad guy Tim but maybe you have heard the old spiel often enough that you haven't evaluated it for yourself recently. Also, I am always up for a good discussion of five space N-dimentional non-euclidian geometry. Have a great evening and a pleasant tomorrow.