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Premier management consultant Peter Drucker, a former journalist, used to joke that newspapers only called people like him gurus because they couldn’t fit “charlatan” in to headlines. I can’t think of any – save some peak oil maddies – who would apply this pejorative term to Daniel Yergin.

Chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, Yergin is the bees knees when it comes to energy opinion. “Distinguished energy expert,” as an international journal described him this week, hardly does justice to his standing. It all rubs off on his colleagues, too, so the 1,500 delegates at the APPEA Conference in Darwin at the month’s end, will hanging on the words of one of his consultancy executives, Michael Stoppard, with equal interest.

Yergin is very much the oil guru, but Stoppard’s Darwin focus will be on natural gas, specifically LNG, and federal Energy Minister Martin Ferguson, another speaker at the event, will feel no pain in hearing Australia described as an “investment area of choice for finding and developing gas,” (a quote from the advance abstract of Stoppard’s talk).

For gas investors, says Stoppard, the local attractions lie in an open regime, low political risk, a relatively high-value domestic market and great prospectivity, including a choice between conventional offshore developments or emerging onshore coal seam opportunities.

Stoppards adds that he intends to focus on a set of important policy decisions facing Ferguson and the Rudd government: (1) how fast should Australia convert the value of its gas from molecules in the ground to cash; (2) how much natural gas should be exported and used to develop local industry; (3) what is a fair pricing policy that helps the country to benefit from its natural endowment without wasting it; (4) what is the correct balance between relying on the best available international technology and prioritising use and investment in domestic technology; and (6) how can Australia both encourage development and not give away unnecessary value to private investors.

Those are issues that cut right to the heart of the policymakers’ challenges here, and some have resonance in energy areas other than gas.

Stoppard, I’m sure, will not be surprised to discover that the APPEA delegates, while listening to all this with much interest, will want to give him GBH of the earhole when he is offstage about every petroleum person’s big question: what is going to happen to the global oil price?

Here, no doubt, he will be channelling Yergin because the CERA view is dominated by the master. Which isn’t to suggest the rest of the team are glove puppets – just that, led by Yergin’s views, they have developed a collective perspective that is as consistent as it is acute. The good news that Yergin sees at the moment – as evidenced in an interview with the Wall Street Journal mid-month – is that oil producers seem to be gaining “both the capability and confidence” to maintain a steady stream of capital investments in new production and augmented refining operations. This, he thinks, should help avoid the economic damage of severe price swings.

In this regard, Yergin has an interesting observation to make on the current attempts to revive the US economy. “People seem to have forgotten,” he says, “that one of the factors leading in to this deep recession was the impact of very high oil prices over seven consecutive years. Detroit was not knocked on its back by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, but by what happened at the gasoline pump.”

It is this sort of cut-to-the-quick insight for which he and his CERA team are renowned. As I know from my own time managing APPEA – essentially the 1980s – you don’t walk away from talking to Yergin & Co without feeling better informed.

The undoubted core message Stoppard will bring for Ferguson and other policymakers down here is the long-held Yergin/CERA mantra that “investment decisions are rooted in expectations about future value” – and those expectations are always informed by market conditions, politics and technology.