I've been trying to find out more about when he said this and what the original context was, but it's hard to search for now because the Interwebs are full of people talking about oil actually reaching $144. But it seems to have come from a 1999 interview with Al Jazeera correspondent Jamal Abdel-Latif Ismail. This article in a journal published by the US Army ("Military Review") describes the interview and the book that the correspondent wrote later. The petro-politics matter comes up at the end, on page 6 of the Web version, and the syntax is a little jumbled so it's hard to figure out what he means:
Ismail describes Bin-Laden's belief that America robs Saudi Arabia of its oil wealth. Bin-Laden explains that during the reign of King Faisal, the United States paid only 70 cents per barrel [of oil]. In the 1973 oil crisis, the Muslims asserted their economic power using oil as a weapon, and prices began to rise to $40 per barrel. When the [oil] prices leveled off to $36, the United States pressured Gulf countries to increase their production to lower prices. Bin-Laden labels this "the great swindle." Doing basic math, Bin-Laden explains that from $36 the price was lowered to $9 per barrel, he relates the retail price at $144 per barrel, or a loss of $135. He multiplied $135 by the 30 million barrels produced in the Islamic world daily, totaling a loss of $4.5 billion per day for Muslim nations. He breaks down the loss over 25 years to $30,000 for every Muslim man, woman, and child. Although this is an oversimplification of petroleum production and evolution of agreements between oil companies and oil-producing nations, it is highlighted to demonstrate the skill with which Bin-Laden panders to the disenfranchised, giving them an alternate history.
So it sounds from that like he thinks oil is just intrinsically worth $144 a barrel, but there are obviously some translation problems and it's just paraphrased here. I'm looking for the original interview in Arabic to see if I can figure it out, but I'm kinda busy today too.
We (Saudi Arabia) get paid $9 per barrel for light, sweet crude.
Petrol (and other fractions) sell at a price of $144 a barrel.
Thus, we're missing out on $135 per barrel.
Now, in part this is intentional neglecting of the hard work that the people who turn oil into petrol do. But, at the same time, it's a classical indictment of the colonial system that pays peanuts for raw materials and then reaps huge profits from finished goods, supported by restrictions on knowledge, capital and technology transfers that the colonial system implies.
He says "retail price". Could he have been referring to the retail price at the time rather than making a prediction for the future. At 159 litres per barrel, this works out at around 1$ (not much different from a Euro at the time), which may have been a reasonable retail price in many countries. (Not having owned a car for ages, I don't have a good feel for prices that far back).
In other words, I conjecture that he was regarding all of the European taxes on fuel as being thefts from the Saudis as well, and was not making any prediction at all. If I'm right, he must be having a good laugh sitting in his cave watching the coverage of his "prediction" coming true.
