According to Chris Midgley, head of analytics at S&P Global Platts, there is still so much oil stored that tanks would hit their limit in about 3 weeks. Traders are starting to pay whatever consumers they have now to take the oil, so that they don’t have to look for ways to keep it somewhere safe.

To some sellers, closing their business seems to be less of a loss than giving away oil in this manner. Oil producing companies are announcing that they’d lessen the production to fit the demand better, and even though it may help them for a period of time, it won’t be enough due to lack of sufficient storage facilities.

Specialists are saying that the only way it can improve is if things go back to normal and people start to live their life as usual. Just encouraging people to open a few shops and go to their workplace won’t make much of a difference. But all of this is impossible in the midst of the global crisis, as it’d put everyone in danger.

Francisco Blanch is a commodity strategist at Bank of America, and he said that the combination of the pandemic and the war of oil price between Saudi Arabia and Russia could cause inventories to rise to 900 million barrels very soon and the world currently has only about 1.5 billion barrels of storage available for crude oil. This would cause producers in U.S. and Canada to get deeply in the red when hedges run out. Moreover, the economy of Iraq, Venezuela, Nigeria and other weaker OPEC countries would collapse.

This is a historical decline and the only way people can be optimistic now is to temporarily close down various oil-crude industries, and fund the research centres to gain an effective vaccine as soon as possible for things to get back to the way it was.