Malcolm Moore

Central banks forecast.

use it as a sort of, oh, neutral.

This is a neutral thing.

We don't have to make our own forecast about the future of energy.

We're just going to take this, what the market says.

But let me just explain what that curve does or what that market is.

If you're an oil company and you're going to be pumping oil out of the ground in six months' time, you would like to know today, before you make the decision on whether to invest in a new oil field,

how much you're going to get for your oil in six months' time.

And if you're a buyer of oil, you're a refinery, and you're going to need crude in six months' time to turn it into fuel, you also need to know what sort of price you're going to pay because, hey, you'd rather fix it today than just take a chance that in six months' time it was something different.

That allows everybody to do their financial planning, right?

So it's a hedging tool.

It's basically you can take the risk out of the system.

You can say, today, the most I'm willing to pay or the least I'm willing to accept for my oil in the future is $80 a barrel, right?

That doesn't mean that in six months time, it's going to be $80 a barrel, because actually, when we get there, we can see that the curve has a terrible track record of predicting prices.

The curve always just gently slopes into the future, right?

Because, you know, that's what people do when they're trying to hedge their risk.

That's what risk hedging curves look like.

But when we get to the future, it's usually a totally different situation.

No, I don't think so.

Again, I don't think anybody in the market is trying to actually predict what the price is.