"We thought that maybe somewhere within $50 to $70 (oil price) we might get the economic damage and that it would take a major, not a minor, disruption to get to the $105 number," said Arjun Murti, Managing Director at Goldman Sachs.

"If we truly did have a major outage in a major exporting country then $105 will prove conservative," Murti added at the National Bank of Kuwait energy forum.

Murti said when Goldman Sachs issued a projected range of $50 to $105 a barrel in March 2005, actual prices hovered around $55 a barrel. Oil prices in New York and London traded above $70 Friday.

Katherine Spector, head of energy research for JP Morgan Securities, said market fundamentals point to petroleum prices reverting to a higher mean in coming years. "The world is running out of easy barrels of crude production," she said, adding that marginal costs of production are rising.

Both Spector and Murti said one factor that the oil markets will remain focused on for the rest of this year would be the U.S. hurricane season after Katrina caused big disruptions last year to refining capacity on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita had shown "energy markets are highly susceptible to a supply shock," Murti noted.

Spector said another severe hurricane season predicted for this year was bullish for oil and products prices as are changes to U.S. diesel and gasoline specifications this year. But she said among factors that are bearish for the market are relatively comfortable global oil inventories.

ASIAN DEMAND

Other delegates told the forum that global oil market fundamentals pointed to the possibility of higher prices given that global oil demand is robust and tends to grow every year, especially due to firm demand from China and India.

Edward Morse, executive adviser with Hess Energy Trading Co., said that between 1965 and 2004, total Asian oil demand has risen 620 percent while world oil demand was up by 158 percent.

"Asian energy demand growth, especially oil demand, has been truly extraordinary," Morse said, adding that most analysts believe incremental Asian demand growth drives the market.

On the supply side, spare capacity is gone, traditional areas of oil production are mature and areas with growth are geopolitically or demographically challenged, Murti noted.

"We believe that oil markets are in the early stages of what we are calling a multi-year 'super-spike' period," Murti added.

Murti said total non-OPEC crude supply has grown in recent years mostly due to Russia, but excluding Russia the supply from producers that are outside the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries has been essentially flat in recent years.

"Effective production capacity -- that what actually can come out of the ground today -- is pretty close to zero," he said. "Our point is not that the OPEC countries are running out of oil. But the question is, are we to believe that real-time production capacity is going to grow, year in and year out, to match economic growth?."

"Timed's extended mission will bring insights into atmospheric evolution and perhaps the fate of the Earth's atmosphere," said Sam Yee, a project scientist from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, which built the spacecraft.

Timed -- short for Thermosphere, Ionosphere, Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics -- focuses on a little-explored region of the atmosphere 40 miles to 110 miles above the Earth.

The area is too high for airplanes and balloons to fly and too low for other satellites to study.

Launched from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in 2001, Timed's mission was extended once before. The new extension will ensure that the satellite operates through this decade.

NASA headquarters didn't immediately know how much the extended mission would cost.

The project is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

"We have no intention of shipping that stockpile," WHO spokesman Dick Thompson said.

An Indonesian health official, meanwhile, said tests had confirmed five more cases of bird flu, three of them fatal.

One of those cases was of a 32-year-old man who on Monday became the last fatality in a human cluster in Kubu Simbelang, a village of about 1,500 people in North Sumatra.

No health workers could be seen Saturday in the village, where dozens of chickens and geese ran among houses and through backyards framed by high mountains and surrounded by rich fields of chilis, oranges and limes.

The family infected by the virus lived in three houses near the church in the Christian village.

The WHO in Jakarta received word from the Indonesian Health Ministry about the cluster on Monday. The Geneva-based organization put Swiss drug maker Roche Holding AG on alert hours later, said Jules Pieters, director of WHO's rapid response and containment group.

Roche spokesman Baschi Duerr said the stockpile, which consists of 3 million treatment courses kept in Europe and the United States, is ready to be shipped at any time to any place.

"We are in very close contact with WHO, even today, and our readiness is geared to be able to deliver," Duerr said. "We are ready to fly it wherever and whenever it's needed."

Pieters stressed the alert was part of standard operating procedure when WHO has "reasonable doubt" about a situation that could involve human-to-human transmission. He said Roche would remain on alert for approximately the next two weeks, or twice the incubation period of the last reported case.

"We were quite keen to inform Roche quite timely," Pieters said. "We knew Thursday would be a holiday in Europe and wanted to make sure Roche warehouses would be open."

On Saturday, Nyoman Kandun, a director general at Indonesia's health ministry, said a WHO laboratory in Hong Kong has confirmed five more cases of human bird flu, three of which were fatal.

All five had earlier tested positive for the H5N1 virus in a local laboratory. Bird flu has now infected 48 people in Indonesia, and 36 of them have died.

Indonesia's number of human bird flu cases has jumped rapidly this year, but public awareness of the disease remains low and government commitment has not equaled that of other countries. Indonesia's reaction has raised concerns it is moving slowly and ineffectively in containing the disease.

Vietnam, the country hardest-hit by bird flu, has been hailed for controlling the virus through strong political will and mass poultry vaccination campaigns. No human cases have been reported there since November.

Indonesia, a sprawling nation of 17,000 islands, has refused to carry out mass slaughters of poultry in all infected areas - one of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization's most basic containment guidelines - saying it cannot afford to compensate farmers. And bio-security measures are virtually nonexistent in the densely populated countryside, home to hundreds of millions of backyard chickens.

Bird flu has killed 124 people worldwide since the virus began ravaging Asian poultry stocks in late 2003.

The latest confirmed deaths were a 39-year-old man from Jakarta, a 10-year-old girl from West Java and the 32-year-old man in the North Sumatra cluster.

He was among six members of an extended Indonesian family who caught bird flu and died. Another family member who died was buried before tests could be done, but she was considered to be among those infected with bird flu.

Health experts have been unable to link the family members to infected birds, leading them to believe the virus may have passed among them. None of the poultry in the village have tested positive for the virus.

But health officials have struggled to gather information or take blood samples from villagers, many of whom believe black magic is responsible for their neighbors' deaths.

The WHO has stressed the virus has not mutated into a version easily passed between people, which would trigger a potential deadly pandemic, or shown any sign of spreading outside the family - all blood relatives who had very close contact with each other.

So far, the virus remains hard for people to catch and most human cases have been linked to contact with infected birds.

The organization has said that limited human-to-human transmission is believed to have occurred in about four previous clusters. It was not immediately clear why WHO had not ordered previous alerts for the global stockpile.

But the most recent and largest human cluster comes after the organization developed important new protocols for mobilizing reserves of the drug.