When oil became waste: a week of turmoil for crude, and more pain to come

HONG KONG/SINGAPORE: The magnitude of how damaged the energy industry is came into full view on April 20 when the benchmark price of US oil futures, which had never dropped below US$10 a barrel in its nearly 40-year history, plunged to a previously unthinkable minus-US$38 a barrel.

In just a few months, the Covid-19 (coronavirus) pandemic has destroyed so much fuel demand as billions of people curtail travel that it has done what financial crashes, recessions and wars had failed to ever do - and leave the United States with so much oil there was nowhere to put it.