I don't want to alarm anybody, but have you seen prices lately?

From American public media, this is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle. It'm Kyle. I'm Rizzdoll. It is Thursday today. This one is the 11th of June. Good as it always is to have you along, everybody.

So, here's what's happened in the oil markets the past couple of days. There was talk of a peace agreement in the war and oil prices went down.

Then there was shooting and oil prices went down. Then there was a president saying he was going to bomb Iran hard

and oil prices went down. And then the president said the bombing is off and here we are.

Oil prices are down. Part of why is that the United States has been drawing down its commercial

and strategic oil reserves.

Crude inventories fell another 7.2 million barrels this week. That brings the drawdown,

Reuters says, to almost 80 million barrels since the war started. There are, yes, still hundreds

of millions of barrels left, but inventories can only get so low before the supply chain starts to break down.

Traders might not care about the geopolitics, but they are sure going to care about the logistics.

Marketplace of Kaylee Wells gets us going.

Out of all those barrels in our oil inventories, a lot of them just aren't accessible.

You think about a large storage tank, there's always going to be some oil at the bottom

that can't be pumped out.

Aaron Brady with S&P Global Energy says there's also the oil that keeps pipes lubricated and

storage caverns safely intact.

So he estimates that roughly 290 million of the 426 million barrels of oil now in the U.S. inventory won't actually get used or sold.

And at the current drawdown rate?

Sometime in July is my best guess is when we get into that danger zone, where we get close to those minimum operating levels.

And even if the war ended today, it takes a couple months to get the global supply chain back up and running normally.

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