Oil price plunges below zero for the first time in history

In entertainment news, the zombie pandemic is presently rat-fucking the entire global oil industry. And you thought it was all bad news.

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Likely Australian petrol price impacts in just a sec. I know a lot of people care about that, perversely: But basically, things are looking really, really good for petrol prices over the next three months, unless of course you own a refinery. 

For consumers, the petrol price outlook is better than it’s looked for 25 years. So that’s rather nice. Even if it’s only hypothetical because you’re not actually allowed to drive anywhere any more.

Oil industry does a Deepwater Horizon, minus the fireball and 11 dead.

First, though, it was quite an historic day yesterday, with destruction of demand sending US oil prices crashing below zero - for the first time in history.

I guess you’re asking: What does that actually mean? It means supply of oil grossly exceeded demand. Storage tanks in the US are full, more or less, and there’s basically nowhere to put any additional supply.

And the rest of the world is approaching this state of gross over-supply as well, upliftingly. So, good news for the oil burners then >>

It means owners of oil in the US yesterday were paying buyers of oil to take it off their hands. Retardistani oil is essentially worthless right now. It’s less than worthless. This would be like the bank paying you interest to take out a credit card with them. They hate that.

The price yesterday for US oil hit minus US$40 a barrel (ish) - that’s minus $63 Australian. In other words, oil producers were paying buyers 39 cents a litre just to take it off their hands (39 cents Australian).

Orange Man - not happy. He’s been fellating his very good friends in the oil industry so enthusiastically while in office. Pumping up the shale oil industry and thus turning the mighty USA into the world’s largest producer of oil - the Roger Ramjet of oil production - oil which nobody wants, today, thanks to the rise of the zombies and subsequent collapse of economic activity.

Let’s not forget that this is a man who thinks a virus is super-intelligent, and he does not apparently understand that antibiotics work only against bacteria, and rather than be ashamed of his ignorance, he feels compelled to educate the public…

He’s such a genius. He makes ScoMo look smart. Which is not that easy.

Too much oil - nowhere to put it. That’s the basic global dynamic. Here’s the crude oil backstory >>

At least we’re not running out >>

Plus prevailing marketplace panic that the zombie apocalypse will cause a deep global recession. So much for Orange Man’s ‘US Energy Dominance’ foreign policy. Oops a daisy.

International oil is doing a little better. Brent is the benchmark there, down to about US$25 a barrel, which itself was a nine per cent fall just yesterday. Brent oil is more a ship-borne thing - so, much easier to move around the globe.

But global demand is down about 30 per cent, with no light at the end of the tunnel in sight. Storage tanks are filling up all over the world. (Regardless of mankind’s addiction to hydrocarbons >> )

For Shitsville motorists, this means paying probably 70 or 75 cents a litre for petrol - trending in that direction over the next eight weeks as the crunch gets worse - and we haven’t seen that since the 1990s. 

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Fuel flashback

The 1990s: That was back when Paula Abdul double-tapped music - right in the centre mass - with ‘Rush Rush’ and ‘Opposites Attract’, and Michael Bolton completed the failure drill with on to the head, entitled ‘How am I supposed to live without you?’ - It’s easy to romanticise the past - but not in this case.

Indeed - who’da thought. She’s half hot - Paula Abdul - but Michael Boulton had better hair. I remember hair >> …barely. Requiescat in pace. Where were we?

If you’re an average Australian dumb shit - say, a news director for a TV or radio network, a religious leader or a cabinet minister, perhaps you run a car industry import operation here in Australia, or edit a magazine - then you need to get it through your incredibly thick skull that ‘oil’ and ‘petrol’ are simply not the same thing.

There’s incredible semantic promiscuity on this.

Oil is a raw material. Petrol is a manufactured product. They’re hardly the same thing. Therefore, oil price impacts the price of petrol, but it’s not linear. Because there’s a simple equation: Petrol price = oil price plus processing and distribution costs, plus tax. And even though the oil price is crashing, (the price of the raw material) the cost of turning it into petrol and transporting it to a bowser near you is not. And the tax component remains. More on crude pricing here>>

In other words, if you see, say, oil price cut in half and you expect to see petrol prices drop by a corresponding 50 per cent you’re a moron.

And remember, ‘our’ oil price is the Singapore Tapis index. If you’re looking for some excuse to feel, erroneously, as if you’re still being ripped off at the bowser, that’s the index to base your absurd claims upon.

This report is proudly sponsored by lubrication, the enemy of friction, which can cause nasty chafing of the (let’s call them) ‘precision parts’. Lubricate now to improve overall serviceability. The economy will thank you. And remember: too much oil is barely enough. More information at at LubeMeUpScotty.com. (May not be a real website.)

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Playing politics

Personally I love the oil industry. It’s my favourite industry. Because of the entertainment value. The Americans hell bent on sticking it so deep into their alleged friends the Saudis. And the Saudis; their dicks routinely eclipsing their brains, which are apparently too small to see that their strategy of bankrupting non-Opec oil producers by over-supplying oil didn’t actually work all that well the first five or six times they tried it. 

Underestimating the joint tenacity of Russia and Retardistan. Because the enemy of my enemy’s enemy is my, ahhh, fuck it: let’s just see where this goes. #SaudiOilProducers

There is no kinship in money, or so the Russians say.

In all of this, I do love Big Vlad. He’s just so virile. We’re talking full man crush here. I’m not gay, but if he asked - just saying. 

Russia is the world’s number two oil producing nation, FYI. Who doesn’t love a bare-chested, ruthless, horse-riding former boss of the Kommitet Gosudarstvennoi Besopasnosti. 

He’s like Trump with a brain, on steroids. Both independently cashed up and pathologically self interested, obviously, but Vlad’s a lot smarter, more rat-cunning, and he knows where all the bodies are buried, principally because he did most of the burying. Vlad is my all-time favourite world leader. Just saying.

Essentially, Big Vlad goes ahead boldly and tells Saudi Arabia’s Kim Jong Un, a chap named Mohammed bin Salman, to go fuck himself. That doesn’t happen very often - and when it does, things typically don’t end all that well for the suggester of sex and travel to MbS.

But, pretty clearly, Big Vlad’s not everyone and he gets away with popping the cap of sex and travel in the grille of MbS because, “Hey, dos vidanya. P.S. we’re Russia: Net, we don’t do quotas, and our production cost is lower than yours, mother-lover. 

“So, would you prefer 40-grit or 60-grit on that slightly used Siberian dildo?” 

That’s pretty much how the conversation went. (I’m paraphrasing.) And MbS - Saudi Six - he’s, like, enveloped in all these yes men. Being an MbS adviser is a process based mainly on attrition. Ability has very little to do with it. So, they’re all too shitscared - of being cut into neat little cubes by eunuchs with big, curvy swords - to tell MbS that this is a fight he can’t actually hope to win.

See, basically, the Retardistanis and the Ruskies can make decent money on oil above about US$40 a barrel, but the Saudis really need to rake in more like US$84 a barrel to turn a quid - which is basically legacy-type fallout from their failed price wars about six years ago.

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Trump: always walking into a situation with his mouth wide open. Image: AP

And so it goes…

And now all of them - Orange Man, horse-riding Vlad and his comrades, and MbS, plus all the subordinate OPEC sociopaths - they’re all being entertainingly rat-fucked, contemporaneously, by a tiny string of allegedly hyper-intelligent, lipid-wrapped DNA only a few hundred nanometres across, which Orange Man seems to think could well have its Mensa application approved any day now, for outsmarting a class of medicines that even the dumbest doctor on earth could tell you were always going to be ineffective against it.

People say the oil industry is boring, but I’m just not seeing it.

Zombie pandemics don’t get any more entertaining than this, I think you’d agree. 

To me, this all makes perfect sense, but I’m certain the extraterrestrial aliens probing us routinely from medium earth orbit find it all so confusing. Because, frankly, as a species, I’d suggest we should be able to do much, much better than this.

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