By Richard Martin, Editor-At-Large

Investors looking for clear future direction - or even a glimmer of sanity - from energy markets must be pulling their hair out heading into the second quarter.

“US Energy Sector Bathed In Red As Oil Falls Below $50/Bbl,” Dow Jones reported on March 30. Twenty-four hours later Bloomberg News crowed “Oil Rises on Stock Rally, Caps Biggest Monthly Gain Since May.”

Hints of a possible economic stabilization have emerged the last few weeks, and production cuts by OPEC have brought indications of an energy-price turnaround: “We are … more confident that oil prices have established a floor,” observed Adam Sieminski, chief energy economist, Deutsche Bank, Washington, D.C., in a research note. Colorado energy stocks actually performed relatively well in the first quarter of 2009 - with some notable exceptions like Delta Petroleum, whose shares lost 75% of their value during the period. (In keeping with the general volatility, Delta shares launched a rebound last week, gaining nearly 30% on April 3 alone.)

Part of this unpredictability comes from the natural uncertainty of a world economy teetering between renewed determination and continued despair. But the energy sector in particular is being whipsawed by conflicting forces, one short-term and one long.

The short-term, of course, is the global recession, which continues to set records as the sharpest downturn since the Great Depression. Until the wider economy rebounds, it’s safe to say that energy prices, and shares in energy companies, will continue to yo-yo. Spot prices for natural gas, the most prominent fossil source on the Western Slope, have declined almost a third since the end of 2008. What’s more, “The fundamentals of the oil market have been shoved to the background as we focus on the stock and currency markets,” energy analyst Jim Ritterbusch told Bloomberg. That means any recovery in oil prices is tied even more directly than usual to the performance of the Dow and the S&P.

The long-term trend is just the opposite: scarcity leading inevitably to rising prices. Writing on EconBrowser, James Hamilton provides a painstaking analysis of the energy economics of the last few years. Two points are worth highlighting here:

No. 1, the sharp oil-price spike of 2007-08 was not, as politicians wished to claim, the result of manipulation by shady speculators, but “an inevitable consequence of booming demand and stagnant production.”

No. 2, in the long turn conventional energy prices have only one way to go. Scarcity “is fundamentally a long-run problem, which has been resolved rather spectacularly for the time being by a collapse in the world economy,” Hamilton writes. But the recession will “prove only a short-run cure for the problem of excess energy demand.”

In other words, when it comes to energy shares, buy and hold. In fact, the role of petro-dollars will reach such criticality in the coming years that energy consultant Chris Cook, a former director of the International Petroleum Exchange, remarks that today, “Oil is not priced in dollars: dollars are priced in oil.” That’s a clever way of saying that, increasingly, the wealth of nations will be measured in power (as in kilowatt-hours, not tanks or laws) rather than in currency or gold. Cook, in fact, proposes “that international trade should be denominated not in dollars, but in energy. Producers of energy, such as Russia and Iran would then - in exchange for value received - issue Units redeemable either in electricity, or in ‘energy vector’ fuels such as gasoline, heating oil, fuel oil and above all natural gas.” Global transactions and settlements would “take place within the framework of an International Energy Clearing Union, subject to the collective guarantees of energy producer and consumer nations generally.”

“A sustainable Energy Clearing Union,” Cook asserts, would provide an “alternative to our current demonstrably unsustainable global monetary system.” It’s a radical vision, worth reading in full on Seeking Alpha.

It won’t happen anytime soon. But it’s no more unlikely than many other upheavals that will mark the 21^st-century energy industry.