Worst Case in Oil Industry
Oil prices turn negative as demand dries up Oil producers are having to pay buyers to take oil off their hands because their storage facilities are full. Photograph: Sergei Ilnitsky/EPA The price of US oil has turned negative for the first time in history. That means oil producers are paying buyers to take the commodity off their hands over fears that storage capacity could run out in May. Demand for oil has all but dried up as lockdowns across the world have kept people inside. As a result, oil firms have resorted to renting tankers to store the surplus supply and that has forced the price of US oil into negative territory. The price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate (WTI), the benchmark for US oil, fell as low as minus $37.63 a barrel. "This is off-the-charts wacky," said Stewart Glickman, an energy equity analyst at CFRA Research. "The demand shock was so massive that it's overwhelmed anything that people could have expected." The
