Oil prices have swung harder this month than in years.

On Wednesday, you saw how – and why – some financial institutions manipulated the market to start these swings.

But to give you insight into why the markets played along with these manipulators, I asked Sean Levine to give you his view of what's happening with oil – and where crude prices are going next.

As director of research and product development at the Energy Capital Research Group, where I'm executive chairman, Sean has an unmatched view of what oil markets are up to.

And as you're about to see, there's nothing real about what's been happening to oil this month.

There are a lot of rumors flying around the oil industry right now, and the financial news channels have no idea how to handle it.

One day, they'll be talking about OPEC abandoning its oil deal and letting oil prices fall.

The next, they'll be all over a drop in oil in storage in the United States, driving prices up. You'd be forgiven for not knowing what on Earth is going on…

And thinking you should just stay out of the energy market altogether.

But nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, today is a great time to get in. You see, there's a reason why oil prices nose-dived so fast two weeks ago…

And why they're recovering at record speed.

For years, I have worked with the U.S. Department of State, providing advice to developing countries on oil and natural gas issues. Our work together goes back some 46 years.

It began during the Vietnam War, when I was recruited into a division of State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), initially involving insertion into the Southeast Asian theater of operations as a field counterintelligence officer.

A great deal of the work I did, and the losses I and others suffered, remain classified to this very day, but suffice it to say that deployment earned me the first of my three Presidential Intelligence Awards – and launched more than two decades of active service in the intelligence community.

However, much of my more recent work has involved matters related to the geopolitics of energy, certainly one of the most complicated and potentially explosive issues our world faces today.

As a result, I have traveled to a number of countries over the years to work with officials on establishing energy policies and practices.

Occasionally, something crosses my desk that brings me back to my very early years, the ones in which theoretical physics was just about the only thing I thought about (aside from playing baseball).

I had a professor then that would comment on how important pure science was, even though more research money flowed into applied matters.

He used to say: "Pure science can teach us about the origins of the universe. But unless you can turn that into developing a quicker-drying paint, there is unlikely to be much market interest in it."

However, over my years in the energy sector, I've seen that the two worlds sometimes come very close together.

And they're about to do just that again. Because researchers have come up with a revolutionary – and cheap – new way to fuel cars.