Over 1 bn barrels of oil have gone missing

Oil hasn’t been coming out of the Middle East for nearly four months. All told, the world lost 1.15 billion barrels of oil supply during the war, according to analytics firm Kpler.
The International Energy Administration’s strategic petroleum reserves are at their lowest levels since 1990. The American emergency reserve is at a 43-year low. And commercial inventories have hit operational stress levels.
“You want to see bedlam?” President Donald Trump said at the G7 in Versailles Wednesday. “We run out of reserves in about four weeks.”
Trump is right. But reopening the strait this week may not get oil out of the Persian Gulf fast enough to prevent crude inventories from effectively running to empty.
Oil prices may have to go higher again.
The oil market certainly believes Trump’s timing is impeccable. Prices have, as he predicted, fallen like a rock in recent days as the memorandum of understanding with Iran took shape and went into effect.
Brent crude prices began falling after the mid-April ceasefire announcement, sinking from a wartime peak of $126.41 to below $80 a barrel today.
The world’s oil stockpiles have fallen – sharply – by 190 million barrels over the past several months. A critical oil hub in Cushing, Oklahoma, which pipes fuel all around the United States, just hit its operational stress level – the equivalent of when the coffee drops below the spigot, and you need to tip the urn to get the last bits of sludge into your mug. Much of what collects at the bottom of an oil tank is unusable gunk, making it hard to maintain pressure in the pipes to get oil out to customers.
It’s not only happening in Cushing – storage facilities around the world are nearing a tipping point.

-CNN