Crude oil, gasoline, and heating oil prices soared yesterday following a Goldman Sachs research analyst’s claim that oil markets have entered a “superspike” period that could see 1970s-style price surges to as much as $105 a barrel.

The Goldman Sachs report said that the energy industry doesn’t have nearly enough capacity to meet current demand for oil, and that sky-high prices are necessary to “meaningfully reduce energy consumption and re-create a spare capacity cushion.”

The report was delivered to a marketplace already skittish about the fourth consecutive decline in weekly gas supplies, as well as last week’s explosion at a Texas City, Texas-based British Petroleum refinery. Moreover, the Department of Energy estimated last week that American demand is running 2% ahead of last year’s level.

Crude oil for May delivery rose by $1.41, or 2.6%, to $55.40 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the highest since March 22. After hitting $1.67 a gallon, an intraday record, gasoline for April delivery rose $0.058 cents, or 3.7%, to close at $1.65 a gallon in New York, the highest close since the contract began trading in 1984.

The bearish call by Goldman analyst Arjun Murti created what a hedge fund trader called “a psychological perfect storm.”

During the last year, hedge funds have pushed up the price of oil and gasoline by buying billions of dollars in oil futures. The Hedgefund.net index of 17 energy-oriented funds returned an average of 40.67% in the last 12 months.

One commodity trader estimated that as much as $20 billion in capital has been put to work in oil futures over the past 18 months.

Mr. Murti, who came in third place last year in Institutional Investor magazine’s widely watched All American Research Team poll in the oil and gas sector, did not return a call for comment.

West Texas Intermediate, the American benchmark that futures are based on, will average $50 a barrel this year, 21% higher than the previous projection of $41.25, according to the report.

Goldman predicted prices would average $55 a barrel in 2006, a 38% increase versus its previous projection.

One analyst said the report’s focus on refinery capacity issues – no new refineries have been constructed in America since 1976 – as well as the growing demand from Asia, is timely. Energy broker Fimat USA’s vice-president of energy risk management, Michael Fitzpatrick, said, “Concern is growing that there will barely be enough fuel to meet growing global demand.” Moreover, the relatively cheap oil prices seen globally for the past decade has caused a situation where “the chickens are coming home to roost,” he said. “Investment in refineries and expanded exploration was deferred and China and India are now major users, which isn’t going to change.”

The notion that $105 might be paid for a barrel of oil was not met with universal acceptance. “Talk about oil reaching over $100 a barrel in a few years is grossly exaggerated,” the director of energy research at Burnham Securities, Mordechai Abir, said to Bloomberg News. Even the most hawkish Organization of Petroleum Countries, which he said identified as Algeria, Iran, and Venezuela, are unified with the rest of the OPEC membership in the desire to see oil prices stabilize, according to Mr. Abir. This is because “current prices are already affecting a good number of the industrial countries’ economies,” he said. OPEC, which pumps about 40% of the world’s oil, agreed March 16 during meetings in Iran to increase production quotas to 27.5 million barrels a day from 27 million barrels a day.

Then there were those analysts who were publicly dismissive of the Mr. Murti’s $105-a-barrel call. The sharpest comment was from a Wachovia Securities analyst, Jason Schenker, who said, “It’s equally likely that oil will touch $105 or $15 a barrel.” Mr. Schenker, departing from the traditionally clubby norms of Wall Street research, where an unwritten rule has long held that analysts do not criticize each other publicly, said Mr. Murti’s opinion was “not a rational expectation.”

“It’s not going to $105 without a major cataclysmic terrorist attack on significant oil infrastructure,” he said.