Cushing Oil Storage Running Out Of Space As Prices Plummet

The country's largest crude oil storage facility located in Cushing, Oklahoma will reportedly be full by the end of the month.
 
“It's a historical event,” OSU Geology Professor Todd Halihan said.
 
With COVID-19 shutting down travel across the country, the demand for gasoline and crude-oil has plummeted, however, oil producers haven’t pumped the breaks on extracting it out of the ground nearly as fast.
 
That has left the country with a lot of oil and few places to put it.
 
One place that could typically help relieve some of the surplus is the nation’s largest oil storage facility in Cushing, where 13 major pipelines converge.
 
“It is the pipeline crossroads of America,” Halihan said. “This would be the heart for the energy industry.”
 
More oil typically flows through Cushing than anywhere in the country, but the coronavirus has kinked the hose causing a massive back up.
 
“Most all of the oil storage facilities across the world are filling up because no one's burning it off right now in terms of running cars or running planes,” Halihan said.
 
With storage facilities running out of space, prices have tanked, and even went negative, because companies simply don’t have anywhere to put it let alone sell it.
 
Halihan said it’s like an airport with lots of arrivals but no departures.
 
“No petroleum flights leaving right now, or very few, but the airports basically filled up with its storage and the planes are all sitting there and they're not going out,” he said.
 
The professor said oilfield workers need to be protected, because America will need them again once things get back to normal.
 
“When people ask, ‘hey I want to go fill up my car again, hey I want to go take a flight somewhere,’ when they ask all of that to happen again, the people that do that need to be in place or that can be a risk going forward,” Halihan said.