First, a confession.

Like many other colleagues in the business media last summer, I thought the price of crude oil was on its way up to 200 dollars a barrel.

So much for my insight.

After that peak of 147 dollars a barrel last July, crude prices collapsed faster than you can say Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

It was a horrorshow for OPEC, the cartel which had made so much hay (or rather petrodollars) during an unprecedented spike, while consumers could only watch in horror as fuel prices soared.

You know the rest of the script by now: the economy of the US - the world's biggest gas guzzler - went into freefall, along with most of the world's big players.

Oil demand fell so far back that by December crude was trading at a feeble 35 dollars a barrel.

But since February, prices have bounced back a very healthy 70% and crude is trading just shy of 57 dollars a barrel as I write this.

Why though? OPEC has only increased amount by a negligible amount and wailed last week about worldwide demand remaining flat.

The blame, for OPEC, lies with over-excited investors, who can smell recovery around the corner - or at least think they can.

They've been taking flight from a weakened dollar these past months and have been pumping - no pun intended - their money into commodities like oil.

OPEC accuses them of artificially inflating the price of crude, but that's not out of any concern for us consumers: it wants to avoid pumping the black stuff out of the ground only to find no one needs it.

So how high will crude go?

I'm going to pass the buck a bit here - cowardly, I know.

But Dow Jones interviewed a panel of analysts who reckon the price of crude will hover at around 62 dollars a barrel well into 2010.

If that proves accurate, then it would be about the right price for the global economy getting back on its feet.

And from an environmental point of view, rising prices will kickstart the search for alternative fuels - something that's dropped right down the political agenda while oil's been so cheap.