It feels like analysts have been predicting a crude crackup forever, but in fact they’ve done so insistently only for the last couple of years. The skepticism only hardened once surging domestic production calmed jitters about Middle East supply, even as an emerging markets slowdown dampened demand growth a bit.

A year into one bearish analyst’s two-year forecast window for West Texas Intermediate at $50 a barrel, it stubbornly trades at $93 despite a production boom sparked by advanced drilling techniques.  Since then we’ve heard a lot about peak oil demand and fuel switching, and yet oil hasn’t cheapened at all since.

Now another bear is calling for $70 WTI next year and the temptation is to dismiss him as out of touch. The market has already spoken, after all. After hesitating well into the spring it’s finally fallen in love with oil patch stocks on the assumption that historically high prices are here to stay. Can so many late converts really be so wrong so soon after discarding their reservations?

Not according to the US Energy Information Administration, which expects 2014 to look a lot like 2013, albeit with slightly cheaper crude and marginally costlier natural gas. The million extra barrels expected to flow from North American shales and oil sands next year will be soaked up by increased emerging markets demand, according to the EIA.

The EIA has often been derided for a lack of imagination in its forecasting, but so far this year its plodding status-quo projections have proven more accurate than the private sector’s headline-grabbing prophesies.

And there are reasons to believe this could continue well into next year. The world is unusually dependent on North America for just about the entirety of new oil production, and the only OPEC producer with meaningful spare capacity right now is Saudi Arabia, which of course is vitally interested in keeping prices high.

If these were the bad old days, the Saudis’ ability to enforce price discipline would be compromised by the shameless cheating of other cartel members. But three top OPEC producers — Libya, Venezuela and Iran — are currently crippled by disorder, mismanagement and embargo, respectively, drastically reducing their oil exports. And a fourth, Iraq, remains a shadow battlefield between Saudi Arabia and Iran, its oil industry a hostage to its aggressive neighbors’ long-running feud.

Until these onetime leading exporters are able to take advantage of Western oilfield services once again, the Saudis should be able to dictate the global price. But even if Mideast exports don’t recover, the Saudi leverage will be eroded within a few years by US exports of liquefied natural gas and liquefied petroleum gas, as well as petrochemicals.

But in the short term, there is little slack and hope for a quick production boost outside of North America. Fixing the Iranian and Venezuelan oil industries will take time, and we’re still waiting for the major political change needed to merely contemplate the possibility. International shale drilling is in its infancy, and probably won’t come into its own until North America’s easier pickings have been more fully exploited.

Developing-country demand continues to grow alongside income in Asia, Latin America and Africa. And even the US is burning more fuel this year than in 2012 despite all the electric cars and hybrids.

As energy investors, we can’t afford to sit and wait for $70 crude that could be a few years away. Too much profit will be extracted from domestic shale before that comes to pass.

But we can be clear-eyed about the fact that the current trend is lower, as we’ve been noting for months, and that this weakness may have further to go.

We also need to be aware of the longer-term likelihood that fuel-switching and meaningful deceleration in demand are not so much failed prophesies as slightly premature but ultimately accurate predictions.

Natural gas production in the Marcellus shale is likely to increase 37 percent this year, based on the EIA’s preliminary numbers, a net energy gain equivalent to approximately 60 percent of the growth in US crude production. If Marcellus output grows another 37 percent next year, a plausible scenario, the gain will equal 80 percent of that in the domestic oil output.

For the moment all this extra gas can only be sold into the well-supplied domestic gas market. But as LNG exports and pipelines to Mexico and Canada ramp up over the next few years alongside petrochemical plants using natural gas liquids as a feedstock, Marcellus gas will increasingly compete with crude on the global markets, as well as with the shale gas from the nearby Utica and distant Monterey shales, and with LNG exports from Australia, Russia and the Middle East.

Once the relatively capacity-constrained crude market is connected via LNG and LPG shipments with the supply glut of natural gas, it won’t matter how much it costs a marginal producer to extract a barrel of crude. Those with wells in the ground and rigs under contract will be under the gun to maximize returns on sunk costs. Low prices might shelve new development, but won’t immediately alter the producer incentives contributing to the oversupply. That’s just how commodity cycles work.

We can’t know when or at what price the top will come. But today’s high prices and the investment in oil production they’re stimulating – Devon’s (NYSE: DVN) Eagle Ford purchase being only the latest example – are absolutely laying the groundwork for an eventual bust, even if it’s still years away.

That being the case, we’ve recently preferred to invest in companies with ample gas reserves and production that can cushion a balance sheet during a crude slump. We’re also looking for energy producers with relatively low production costs and inexpensive market access. These advantages will be essential to surviving the next cycle low. And the current stage of the cycle favors the faster growers with the best shot at capturing the near-term upside while the getting is still good. We’re adding one such name to the portfolio today and will have more in the next issue.