The world could soon run out of space to store oil. Prices may plunge below zero

Depends heavily on the location, but just expanding a crude tank farm in the US is a multi-year design and permitting job, even when you can just throw money at it. There's also significant ongoing regulatory costs of keeping them, even if they're just sitting idled.

Plus much of storage that exists isn't really for storage, but is a needed buffer on the supply line for steady-state infrastructure, like pipelines and refineries. Some amount of empty is required (both practical and by regulation) to absorb surplus, like in the event of an emergency refinery shut down due to fire.

Other cases are for when pipelined supply isn't single product, or is shared by multiple users... Your plant might need 500k bbl/day, but you only get the pipeline every other day at 1000k bbl/day. Or you get different products on different days.

Part of the US strategic oil reserve's purpose is for what's happening right now, and they've been using it to absorb excess capacity for a few weeks, with a few more weeks to go before full. And this is filling entire underground salt domes with oil, at a scale way beyond any manufactured tank capacity.

We'll probably see more tankers and even rail car tankers repurposed for storage, but I don't see anyone justifying the need to build more fixed storage, unless there's some existing/ contributing need for storage that was already permitted and is suddenly cost justified. But even that is at tiny scales compared to the current surplus.

It's just easier and cheaper to start shutting in the more isolated and/or expensive wells. Which is just storing it in the ground, anyway.

And like most places who try to swap resource extraction for tourism they will find that it pays a lot less. States like West Virginia still haven't recovered from the collapse of coal jobs starting in the 1980s, even with tourism. Even in states like Colorado, being a liftie doesn't pay nearly as well as being a hard rock miner.

Focusing on external actors instead of internal corruption is missing the forest for a couple of trees.

Hrm....and why do those state actors work against Venezuelas interest? Perhaps they have aligned themselves with other other oppressive global regimes which nationalize resources to be managed by friends and family rather than competitive enterprises? And who did that alignment? Yep, poorly run government.

That aside, their monetary policy has also been a train wreck from the 70's, and compounded with more bad decisions in the early 2000's. https://mises.org/wire/venezuelas-economic-collapse-was-enab...

Until they fix core issues in their central government/bank, they will continue to struggle in a global economy.

Agreed. Every time I fill up, I now save $20. And I fill up 2-3 times a week.

And, this is on top of it happening once before 2 years ago. I'm now pocketing over $500 a month that I used to spend on fuel.