Cushing crude inventories remained below 20 million barrels from the week ending June 19 through the week ending July 10, the lowest levels seen since 2014.
Crude oil inventories at Cushing, Oklahoma fell below 20 million barrels during the week ending June 19 and stayed there through the week ending July 10, according to the EIA’s weekly petroleum status report. Stocks bottomed out at 20.04 million barrels, roughly 26 percent of the hub’s 76 million barrel working storage capacity. That is the lowest Cushing has run since October 2014.
Cushing is not just another storage site. It is the physical delivery point for West Texas Intermediate futures, the most actively traded oil contract in the world, and the number that shows up whenever anyone quotes the U.S. oil price. When the tanks at Cushing run low, the effects show up in the futures market before most traders even see the inventory report.
Why the Tanks Emptied
The drawdown coincided with disruptions to Middle East oil flows following the Strait of Hormuz crisis, which increased demand for U.S. crude exports. As global buyers turned toward American barrels, Cushing stocks fell for eight straight weeks by mid-June, dropping from roughly 29 million barrels in early May at a pace of about 800,000 barrels a week. Nationally, total U.S. commercial crude inventories sat at roughly 409.7 million barrels as of mid-July, about 4 percent below the five-year average.
The math is straightforward: global demand for U.S. barrels went up sharply, and the physical buffer that normally absorbs swings in supply and demand got drawn down to answer it.
What a Tank Bottom Actually Means
The EIA published a public explainer on July 16 addressing a technical point that suddenly mattered: storage tanks cannot be emptied to zero under normal operating conditions. Every tank requires a minimum volume, called a tank bottom, to keep pump suction effective and pipeline connections functioning. Below that minimum, a tank can still show barrels on the books that are not actually available to move to market. The EIA drew a specific distinction between reported inventory and deliverable supply, and said it is reviewing pilot study results aimed at pinning down the actual minimum working levels at individual storage facilities.
That distinction matters for anyone reading the weekly inventory numbers as a straightforward gauge of available supply. If a meaningful share of the reported barrels at Cushing are effectively stuck at the bottom of a tank, the headline figure overstates how much crude could actually respond to a sudden supply disruption.
The Price Signal Nobody Had Seen Since 2022
The clearest sign of stress showed up in the spread between Brent and WTI. Under ordinary conditions, WTI trades at a discount to Brent because Cushing is landlocked and moving crude from the mid-continent to the coast for export costs money. That discount briefly disappeared. The five-day rolling average of the Brent-WTI spread turned negative from June 18 to June 24, and again from July 2 to July 8, meaning WTI at Cushing was trading above Brent. That was the narrowest the spread had been since January 2022.
A landlocked benchmark trading above the seaborne one is not the normal order of things. It reflects buyers competing hard for crude sitting at a hub that increasingly could not spare it.
What Recovers and What Doesn’t
Inventories at Cushing remained near multi-year lows. The week ending July 17 brought national commercial crude inventories up 2.0 million barrels to 411.7 million, a headline build that traders read as bearish. Cushing itself told a different story: stocks at the hub fell another 700,000 barrels that same week, to roughly 19.4 million barrels, meaning the national build happened entirely elsewhere in the system while the delivery point for WTI kept draining.
Whether Cushing rebuilds a meaningful cushion depends largely on how quickly global crude flows normalize and inventory balances stabilize. Market participants expect the adjustment process to take time, particularly if demand for U.S. crude remains elevated.
For anyone with contracts, hedges, or storage arrangements priced off WTI at Cushing, the inventory report is no longer a routine weekly data point. A hub running near tank-bottom levels behaves differently than one with a normal cushion, and the EIA’s own decision to publish a standalone explainer on the mechanics is itself a signal of how unusual the current situation is.
