$100 Oil on the Way? How about $200?

Anybody else want to buy a house in the suburbs? The commute will kill you...or at least your wallet if oil prices skyrocket!

The $100-a-barrel oil that Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said would prevail by 2009 may be only a few months away.

Jeffrey Currie, a London-based commodity analyst at the world's biggest securities firm, says $95 crude is likely this year unless OPEC unexpectedly increases production, and declining inventories are raising the chances for $100 oil. Jeff Rubin at CIBC World Markets predicts $100 a barrel as soon as next year.

Higher prices will increase revenue for energy producers from Exxon Mobil Corp. to PetroChina Co., while eroding profit at airlines including EasyJet Plc and railroads such as Union Pacific Corp. The U.S. and other oil-importing nations risk accelerating inflation, while higher energy costs threaten to restrain growth.

Benchmark crude oil futures ended last week at $75.57 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, up 51 percent since mid- January and twice the level of early 2003. A record number of options have been sold that give the buyer the right to buy crude oil at $100. The contracts, covering 50 million barrels, only pay off should oil go above the target price.

A National Petroleum Council study led by former Exxon Mobil chairman Lee Raymond, released last week, predicted a growing gap between production and demand for oil and gas during the next two decades. As recently as 2005, Raymond said oil prices had probably peaked and dismissed the possibility that supply and demand could not be brought back into balance.

"There are questions about whether the oil industry can keep up with demand," U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said last week, commenting on the Petroleum Council report.

Oil prices could triple in three months to more than $200 a barrel, given the right circumstances, according to Matthew Simmons, chairman of Simmons & Co., a Houston investment bank.

Gasoline pump prices averaging more than $3 a gallon across the U.S., the consumer of 25 percent of the world's oil, haven't dented sales. Deliveries of gasoline were a record 9.23 million barrels a day in the first half of this year, according to a July 18 report from the American Petroleum Institute in Washington.

"It appears that high prices are acceptable to the American consumer," said Robert Ebel, chairman of the energy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "People want the house with a yard and white-picket fence so they are moving further and further out of the cities. They have to just get up earlier and drive further."

A pullout from Iraq may be the event that pushes oil to $100 a barrel, according to Boone Pickens, the Dallas hedge fund manager who has joined Forbes Magazine's list of billionaires because of his bullish bets on energy prices. Pickens predicted a year ago that $100 oil would probably occur by now. Today he is looking for $80 within six months, and he says growing chaos in Iraq would be a bad sign. "That could run prices pretty high," he said.

Goldman Sachs's Currie also notes similarities to a year ago, with global inventories at about the same level and U.S. government data showing an increasing bet on higher prices.

"At face value this market is strikingly similar to a year ago," Currie said. "What is different? Supply is down a million barrels a day, demand is up a million barrels a day. The market is in a deficit."