Turning My Garage Into A Oil Storage Facility

When you close the global economy and tell everyone to stay at home, the demand for oil is going to drop.  When oil producers don't reduce production in line with the reduction in demand, oil price drop. US oil producers are now in the position of paying more to have their oil stored than the market will pay for the product.  Yikes.

US oil prices turned negative for the first time on record on Monday as North America’s oil producers run out of space to store an unprecedented oversupply of crude left by the coronavirus crisis.

The price of US crude oil collapsed by 114% to -$38 per barrel in a matter of hours, forcing oil producers to pay buyers to take the glut of crude which they cannot store, as rising stockpiles of crude threaten to overwhelm oil storage facilities.

“The problem of the global supply-demand imbalance has started to really manifest itself in prices,” said Bjornar Tonhaugen, head of oil at research firm Rystad Energy. “As production continues relatively unscathed, storages are filling up by the day. The world is using less and less oil and producers now feel how this translates.”