Isn't the price being held at an unsustainably low price by OPEC? If so, then any accounting problems would be short lived. Once OPEC cuts supply, the prices will bounce back to ~$100/barrel, I would expect.
Regarding future price levels the efficient market hypothesis probably holds: nobody without inside information knows which way the oil price is going.
People say,there will be no consequences for USA,but oil prices will go up again sooner or later. What then ? I don't believe shale oil is an explanation.
http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2015/03/05/the-newest-commodi...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2015/03/04/u-s...
The US dollar shaved at least 20%+ off the price of oil, and likely instigated this crash (the world was swimming in oversupply of oil for quite some time before the crash).
The US dollar began skyrocketing, due to the end of QE, at exactly the same time oil began crashing. Not a coincidence, given oil is priced in dollars and the US dollar is on its greatest one year run in decades.
Look at July 1st
The current US inventory issue is akin to this, because it exists in part because refineries are tuned to the types of oil they use, and we've spent quite a bit making a lot of them take heavy, sour crude, and fracking tends to produce light, sweet crude. Which is good stuff, and in high world wide demand, but due to another one of those insane '70s energy policies, no one is allowed to export crude (with I think one exception, to refineries that immediately return the distillates to the US).
E.g. we should have exported a lot of Alaskan oil to Japan, when California was not set up to take all of it, and it would have cost less to transport it to Japan and equivalent oil to the US.