Energy Prognostications Focus on Price Variables : Commodities: The conventional wisdom is that, at least in the short term, oil will remain the world’s primary fuel.

LONDON — Consumers should be ready to pay more for energy in the 1990s, industry experts say.

They do not altogether rule out another oil price shock such as the ones that jolted the world economy in 1973 and 1979.

And governments may eventually levy new taxes to make people burn less gas, oil and coal if ecologists convince them that carbon dioxide and other emissions from these fossil fuels threaten a disastrous global warming.

On the other hand, where energy is concerned, any predictions require a big dose of skepticism.

At the start of the 1980s, for instance, there were forecasts that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries might by the decade’s end have raised the price of oil to $100 a barrel. The spot price now is around $18.

Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, then Saudi Arabia’s oil minister, was among a few who challenged the conventional wisdom that producers could push prices up indefinitely.

“People said Yamani was mad,” the sheik likes to recall.

Even so, the 1980s did bear out Yamani’s fear that sky-high prices would create a glut. High prices forced the West into conservation and into a quest for its own oil from such areas as Alaska and the North Sea.

New technology, the Greens lobby and volatility in Eastern Europe and the Middle East are the jokers in the energy pack.

The conventional wisdom is that, at least in the short term, oil will remain the world’s primary fuel, accounting for about 40% of all energy used, and therefore remain a price pacesetter.

Oil demand is now back where it was before the glut and rebounding. U.S. and Soviet output are falling, but many other producers in and out of OPEC are pumping at or near capacity.

So, industry leaders say, most extra oil needed must come from a few big Middle Eastern sellers such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq and Iran. Emerging in OPEC as “a cartel within a cartel,” they control two-thirds of world reserves.

The Persian Gulf producers insist that, this time around, they will never hold consumers to ransom.

“OPEC does not want to push very high prices,” said Oil Minister Gholamreza Aqazadeh of Iran. His country used to be OPEC’s leading pricing militant.

Saudi Arabia’s Hisham Nazer said OPEC has learned that “too high a price merely sets the stage for too low a price.”

Events, however, have overwhelmed OPEC before.

The price raced up to $40 a barrel a decade ago, not because OPEC decreed it but because consumers, led by Japan, went on a panic-buying spree to build up stocks. They feared that Iran’s 1979 revolution would spread through the gulf.

Some experts also wonder where OPEC nations will find the money to restore their capacity to produce extra oil, much of which “rusted in” when it was left idle during the glut.

Iraqi Fadhil al-Chalabi, a former OPEC deputy secretary general, said most will need Western help.

He estimated current OPEC capacity at 25 to 26 million barrels per day. Production is already 23 million bpd and rising.

Upheaval in Eastern Europe and Soviet economic reforms may augment the demand for Middle Eastern oil.

The Soviet Union, the biggest petroleum producer, made nonsense in the 1980s of Central Intelligence Agency predictions that its output would drop. In 1988 it hit a record 12.6 million bpd, albeit achieved at prohibitive costs.

“Approximately one out of every seven rubles invested in the country’s industry in 1981-1985 went to the extraction of oil,” said Alexander Arbatov, a Soviet energy adviser.

The Soviet Union, he argued, has no option but to cut production, and this is likely to mean a decline in exports.

One OPEC scenario sees Western cash revamping the economies of Eastern Europe and inevitably firing up oil demand there. If Soviet oil is not available, demand would go to OPEC.

Technology and a worldwide environmentalist campaign could play either way for OPEC.

Under Green pressure, technology might achieve practical nuclear fusion or develop cars using less gasoline.

Highly efficient power stations fired by natural gas are a more immediate prospect. New techniques can also extract more oil from declining non-OPEC fields.