Just three years ago, the Permian shale oil boom was under threat: production was growing fast, but pipeline capacity wasn’t. At one point , over one two-week period, eight of the biggest oil producers with a presence in the play shed a collective $15.6 billion in market value—or over $1 billion per day—as the producers rushed to ditch their backed-up crude at basement prices. Now, three years later, there are too many pipelines in the Permian. Almost half of oil pipelines carrying crude oil from wells in the Permian are going to be empty by the end of the year for lack of enough oil to transport, Reuters’ Devika Krishna Kumar reported this week, citing analysts and industry executives. It’s all because of the pandemic, of course. The global spread of the coronavirus destroyed oil demand and led to a sharp drop in U.S. oil production. Neither demand nor […]