FourBrane

An Oil-Driven Paradigm Shift?

The comments found here are a representative cross section of the idea spectrum, running from right wing drill anywhere and to hell with the damn land people to back to moccasins and bone needles conservationists to the dreaming Polyannas who are certain that Amenrican Inventiveness can cure anything. Three blind men discussing the elephant, each describing their particular guess on what it looks like based on trunk, leg and tail.
Sadly, I doubt that there is a easy way out of this one because the elephant in the room is over-population. Demand for oil, food, water, and every other resource is now or will shortly be approaching asymptote.
Buy oil, natgas, uranium, other metals, water rights...and guns.

Fuel Check

It is amusing to read stories today using "plumeted" to reference a drop of $2 and change. As for inventories, they may fall for lots of reasons...oil refiners may decide to draw down in hopes they can replace stocks later more cheaply, or, bad weather or other difficulties delay offloading tankers, or, a key supplier decided to fill an order to China ahead of our guys.
I think Jangchup has it right. It's some intermediate profit taking.
Bespoke's charts show us just what we would expect as a commodity becomes hugely more expensive: processors stop storing tons of it. Very few jewelers can afford to keep thousands of pounds of gold laying around waiting for use, but if gold were as cheap as bricks you'd see towering stacks of the stuff in the jeweler's back yard...for convenience. Same with refiners. They pay attention to dollar inventory turns llike anyone else. To fill a tank farm now takes twice as much money. Only a fool would keep up the old habits of filling all his tanks to the max.