The original Cushing oil boom was started in 1912 by a man actually named Tom Slick. Not relevant to the post but I had to mention it.

In  most big stories, there are one or two pieces of absolutely essential context that get reported in major outlets but which no one seems to pay much attention to.

David Goldman reporting for CNN:

Today, neighboring Cushing is the hub of America’s energy market. It literally provides the oil plumbing for the United States. It’s where America’s benchmark West Texas Intermediate oil is priced and warehoused. From there, it’s piped to refineries around the country.

In normal times, Cushing stores around 40 million barrels of oil with capacity of up to 75 million.

These are not normal times.

Cushing’s current inventory is 21.6 million barrels, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

That’s dangerously close to operational stress levels, the tipping point at which Cushing struggles to supply all of its customers with the oil they demand.

When Cushing’s reserves get below 20 million, they effectively hit empty, scraping the bottom of the barrel of what is largely unusable sludge. 

...

Despite the largest crude supply shock the world has ever seen, US oil and gas prices still haven’t hit record highs during the three-plus months of war with Iran. And they’ve been sliding – sometimes sharply – in recent weeks.

That’s largely because the world was historically oversupplied with oil going into the crisis. Those stockpiles have acted as a global shock absorber.

But commercial oil inventories are rapidly dwindling. Oil stockpiles in the world’s wealthiest nations are falling by 6.3 million barrels per day and are sitting at just 2.6 billion barrels, according to the US Energy Information Administration. That’s just 100 million barrels above operational stress levels, said David Oxley, chief climate and commodities economist at Capital Economics.

The oil market can’t run down to the last drop, like your car can. Below a certain threshold, pipelines can’t maintain pressure and refineries can’t deliver all the various fuel grades their customers demand.

“Like blood pressure in the human body, the issue is circulation,” said Natasha Kaneva, head of commodities strategy at JPMorgan. “The system does not fail because oil disappears, it fails because the circulation network no longer has enough working volume.”

At this rate, the world’s oil market could enter the danger zone within a month.

That CNN story ran on 2026/06/12.

 

Here's another piece of context from Bloomberg.

 

 

 

As Nicholas Grossman‬ commented:

Graph of Strait of Hormuz crossings since June 2025. See that little spike all the way on the right? The one that's much lower than the leftward 2/3 of the graph, and immediately crashes back down?

That's what the US government and quite a bit of US media tell us is fully open, with normal traffic.