Refinery maintenance could drive prices to $20/barrel

Bloomberg takes a closer look at how the Spring maintenance season could lead to scenarios where oil is dumped onto the market at any cost because there is nowhere to store it.

The most-serious spot to watch is along the Gulf coast, rather than Cushing. If it's an average year for maintenance, they forecast storage will hit 86% but if it's a bad year for outages, the amount of oil will exceed storage capacity by 26%.

The caveat is that the numbers were crunched assuming unchanged levels of US production this year and that's highly unlikely to be the cast.

WTI crude oil prices reached as high as $48.56 earlier today but have fallen to $47.49, virtually unchanged on the day.