Also unprecedented in this pandemic: oil industry goings-on

Business and politics move fast, but during this COVID-19 pandemic it feels like everything happens even faster. Like, the oil and gas industry just experienced 25 years’ worth of news in the last two months.

Meanwhile, 98 percent of us have simply adjusted our face masks, shrugged and continued our mission of becoming amateur epidemiologists, constantly refreshing our browsers for the latest COVID-19 mortality counts.

Despite our monomaniacal COVID-19 focus, we’ve probably noticed low gas prices at the pump. Not that we drive anywhere, so we can’t actually benefit from it. The price of regular gas hasn’t been this low in 20 years. That in itself would be a major weird story in ordinary times. Which these are not.

Then there was April 20, when the price of deliverable barrels of oil spiked downward to negative prices on the final settlement day of May futures.

A few unlucky holders of oil futures who could not take delivery of barrels of oil in Cushing, Okla., had to pay to unload their positions — some for as low as negative $40 per barrel.

There was a probably temporary and probably COVID-induced scarcity of storage on the May futures delivery day, so we saw something nobody had ever seen in the history of oil futures: negative prices.

We probably are not headed into a future in which clever entrepreneurs regularly get paid once a month to fill their bathtubs with all the flammable barrels they can carry out of Cushing. But it was pretty weird.

A month later, at the June futures expiration date of May

19, the price of the benchmark barrel — known as West Texas Intermediate — rose to a low but at least normalish price of $32.50. This is not a healthy price for U.S. producers. But at least it wasn’t a we-have-neverseen-this-before-in-our-lifetime price.

But you know what was a we-have-never-seen-this-beforein-our-lifetime event? U.S. federal petro policy. At least as briefly proposed by a series of tweets by President Donald Trump in early April.

Trump, at least according to his tweets, appeared to orchestrate a production-cut agreement between global oil producers, specifically citing Saudi Arabia and Russia, and pledging U.S. cuts as well.

In any other (normal) time, the U.S. engaging in coordinated production cuts with its OPEC