The price of oil has doubled since its $35 low of December 2008, and the commodity’s ascent has sparked a strong start on the world’s oilfield-focused burses while making optimists of some doomsayers.

Offshore-savvy Oslo’s main index is up 60 percent since the depths of year-end 2008, and on Monday started strong with a 1.6 percent gain. For a second week, the Canadians of Calgary-based Artumas group led shares with a 33 percent gain.

Locally based survey outfit Seabird was up 15.3 percent, although it was competitor TGS Nopec which announced a new Gulf of Mexico geophysical study. Meanwhile, Middle East rig-making yard Maritime Industrial Services was up 12.5 percent in Oslo.

Though North Sea oil traded at just over $72, oil-focused exchange RTS in Moscow made its own gains, asnd was up 3.89 percent my lunctime in Moscow. Gazprom was up 3.86 percent on the first trading day after it announced it was scaling back overly ambitious spending plans for 2010.

Russian oil majors Lukoil (up 1.7 percent) and Rosneft (up 2.12 percent) showed their strenght on the substantial oil price.

The climb of oil shares also brought a lifting of grey skies in other quarters. The man who yelled loudest that 2008 would bring financial crisis, economist Nouriel Roubini, was reported by Bloomberg News as saying he saw a rally in commodities, and perhaps indirectly commodity-based shares.

The New York University professor, nick-named "Dr. Doom", said 2010 may see a rally in commodities as economies shrink less fast or begin to grow again.

“There is now potentially light at the end of the tunnel,” he was quoted by Bloomberg as saying.

Oil and natural resources based Toronto Stock Exchange ended trading Friday up one percent, and a strong start is expected Monday with new numbers suggesting the Canadian and American economies pulling out of recession. The Purchasing Managers Index also shows Asian economies again in full swing.

“It looks like it’ll be a good day. With a strong oil price and the PMI Index in China came in better than expected,” stock strategist Joern Lyshoel of Nordea told Norwegian online business daily DN.no.