Oil prices gained a dollar today to approach last week’s record high of $133 a barrel after Nigerian rebels blew up a pipeline belonging to Royal Dutch Shell, forcing it to cut production. This from the Financial Times:

Crude prices jumped on Monday in electronic trading as news of the attack broke, but analysts said the impact on prices spilled over into Tuesday, when exchanges on both side of the Atlantic re-opened after the long weekend.

“Is it demand? Is it speculation? Is it OPEC punishing George Bush for the war in Iraq?” asks Dan Denning in The Daily Reckoning Australia. “OPEC thinks there’s plenty of oil. It’s the declining U.S. dollar that’s to blame. OPEC says that for every one percent decline in the dollar oil rises by US$4, and vice versa.

“The solution to high oil prices, then, is not increased supply or reduced demand, but a stronger U.S. dollar! Well, there is certainly some truth to that, but it is not likely to happen any time soon. As a tangible good whose supply cannot be increased by a central banker, the oil price (a little like the gold price) tells you there’s too much paper money chasing too little stuff.”

Alexander Green in Investment U has identified a new, highly profitable oil source: “Alberta’s oil sands are the largest known reserve of oil on earth, containing between 1.7 and 2.5 trillion barrels. (Saudi Arabia, by comparison, has only 262 billion barrels of proven reserves. In fact, all OPEC nations combined have less than 900 billion barrels.) For decades, these sands weren’t even considered part of the world’s oil reserves because the oil there wasn’t economically extractible at prevailing prices using then-current technology.

“But times have changed… And the new gold rush is on.

“In Alberta’s oil sands, energy companies don’t drill for oil. They dig it up. After excavation, giant trucks three stories high – carrying up to 400 tons of oil sands – carry it off to a processing plant.”

Read on here to find out how to cash in on the tar-sands “black gold” rush with this oil mining company.