Never happened in the history of the oil industry before 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.
The severe drop on Monday was driven in part by a technicality of the global oil market. Oil is traded on its future price and May futures contracts are due to expire on Tuesday. Traders were keen to offload those holdings to avoid having to take delivery of the oil and incur storage costs.
In the United States and elsewhere, oil-producing businesses have made commercial decisions to cut output. But still the world has more crude oil than it can use.
And it's not just about whether we can use it. It's also about whether we can store it until the lockdowns are eased enough to generate some additional demand for oil products.
It isn't rocket science STOP PRODUCTION at least for a month or two
