A few weeks ago, energy executives were lamenting a purgatory of “lower for longer” oil prices. As an epic bust persists, the rhetoric now involves eternal torment. “People keep calling it a cycle. I call it pure hell,” Jim Teague, chief of Enterprise Products Partners, told fellow executives at Houston’s IHS CERAWeek conference this week. Lake of fire or not, the oil market has certainly become increasingly alarmed by vast pools of excess crude stored in tanks around the world, with more added every day. At the conference, senior executives and officials outlined a path for prices that remains low in the short term, somewhat higher by year-end and subject to furious swings along the way. The direction of oil prices matters greatly outside energy hubs such as Houston. Oil influences inflation and lately seems to have guided equity markets. Stanley Fischer, vice-chair of the Federal Reserve, told the conference the price of oil had become amacroeconomic issue. The rout has hurt not only producers, but pipeline partnerships such as Enterprise, once a popular bet for yield-seeking investors. Veteran oilmen tend to shy away from forecasting prices, a humility born of surviving multiple busts. In the past 30 years the industry has endured four: in 1986, 1998, 2009 and now. Stephen Chazen, chief executive of Occidental Petroleum, warned of a “false bottom — or two or three or four”.