"Recently" becomes a longer and longer period of time, the older you get.
Do you think that it was a 16 year old that came up with the Soviet 5 year plans? Nah, a month is a long time for a sixteen year old to plan ahead for.
In this context I be talkin 12 months or less.
When I bought US $ forward just about 11 months ago I was paying $1.30 ish Canadian. Now I need some short term and I just paid .99 Cdn for those same US$. I'm not going to get in to production costs per bbl since they really don't have squat to do with the price of the refined product at the pump, let alone the market price of crude oil, but just for the sake of this conversation say that the bbl that the pumpjack a couple of hundred yards away from me just now pulled out of the ground cost me 10 bucks CDN. The US$ back a while ago would have allowed you to get that bbl out for 7ish US dollars but now it'll cost you 10. Not to put too fine a point on it I'd be checking real quick on what I'd get for those 10 US$ which I normally have no reason to hold since I pay everything out in Cdn$ or Euros or Yen, before I let anyone turn a valve.
Translated to recent times there's 25-30 bucks a bbl more that you can account for just with currency. You don't even want to consider the multiplier effect on that difference that the guvmint folks with their hands out for royalties and other donations have on the final price. If you really believe that any government wants to see the price of oil fall then PM me and I'll give you the name of a little place in the 14 arrondissement in Paris where you can further explore your perhaps already excessive use of hallucinogens.
Now, back to Africa... the place seemed to be an endless stream of stories about this Chinese trade delegation or that Chinese trade delegation and the chunks of US cash that they are converting in to raw material deals of one sort or another. Yessiree bub! The demand is increasing.
I paid a buck a litre for gasoline yesterday so about 3.78 a US Gallon. That's still dirt cheap compared to what that same litre goes for in much of the rest of the world. Ok, you can buy cheap gas in Caracas or Tripoli, but do you really want to live there?
There will be some adjustments in the US economy as the general population joins the rest of the world and looks at what the overall cost of a BTU has become. There is no lack of inventive people in the US so I'd bet that local solutions will be found.