As of noon New York time, today March 30, U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate fell another 5.67% to $20.29 a barrel. International benchmark Brent dropped 9.83% to $22.45 a barrel.
That’s an 18-year low for oil.
And worse is yet to come. The world has run out of storage and Russia and Saudi Arabia continue to pump above market demand in their war for control of production targets and prices. At the U.S. Cushing, Oklahoma, oil hub, for example, inventories surged by 4 million barrels last week raising fears that Cushing will run out of storage capacity.
I don’t think the $20 a barrel level will hold. Today, briefly, in intraday trading in New York crude dipped below $20.
Effective prices for actual barrels of oil, as opposed to prices for future delivery, in some markets have dropped below $0 as producers are willing to pay consumers to take and store oil. For example, oil from Canadian producers hit a record low of $3.82 a barrel. Add in transportations costs to the Midwest of Gulf Coast and that oil is selling for less than $0 a barrel.
In the U.S. Wyoming Asphalt Sour, a dense oil used to make paving bitumen, was the first grade to sell for negative prices.  In the oil price collapse four years ago North Dakota sour crude was briefly priced at a negative 50cents a barrel.It looks like we could be headed for that neighborhood again for some grades of crude.
The drop in oil prices from here won’t be evenly distributed across all grades of crude. Watch out particularly for any grades that compete with Saudi and Russian crude grades. That competition is one reason that the gap between Brent crude, a grade which does compete with Saudi and Russian production, and West Texas Intermediate, a grade with less direct competition with those international grades, has shrunk to just $2.16 a barrel from as much as $5 to $8 before the coronavirus collapse in demand and the Saudi-Russian production war.
The amount of oil in storage is also one reason to expect that a recovery in demand after the coronavirus recession will produce a muted rise in oil prices since oil consumers will be able to drawn down on so much “extra” storage.
