Supply Chain and Logistics professionals must cope with increasingly wild swings in oil and diesel fuel prices, and the last two weeks have illustrated that perfectly.

After continuing a two-month decline into early September, with prices briefly dipping into the mid $90s per barrel in the face of slumping demand, oil suddenly spiked briefly back up to about $130 as the current financial crisis unfolded, probably due to general economic uncertainty.

That short bubble quickly burst, and oil is now back to about $100 per barrel, well off the highs reached in July of almost $150 per barrel.

While that is welcome relief, as the chart below shows, the current price is still more than 20% higher than the same prices at this time in 2007.

At $100 per barrel, logistics is still very expensive.

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