On April 20, 2020, the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil futures contract for May delivery settled at an unprecedented negative $37.63 per barrel. This historic event was caused by a severe imbalance of supply and demand during the COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with a lack of available storage capacity at the Cushing, Oklahoma delivery hub.
Key factors included:
Extreme Oversupply & Collapsed Demand: Global lockdowns drastically reduced the demand for energy products, leading to a massive surplus of oil.
Storage Constraints: Storage facilities at Cushing, the physical delivery point for WTI futures, were quickly approaching full capacity.
Physical Delivery Obligations: As the contract's expiration date approached, traders who did not need or could not take physical delivery were forced to sell their contracts at any price, essentially paying buyers to take the oil (a liability at that point) off their hands.
System Readiness: Prior to the event, on April 8, 2020, the CME Group had issued an advisory notice confirming that its systems were capable of handling and processing zero or negative prices, allowing the market to function under extreme conditions.
Current CME Policy
The CME Group has confirmed that support for zero or negative futures and/or strike prices is standard throughout its systems and that all file and message formats support such prices. The exchange's position is that the futures market "worked to perfection" in reflecting the physical market's fundamentals during the 2020 event, highlighting the potential for prices to go negative when the physical commodity itself becomes a liability due to storage or disposal costs.
For detailed information on contract specifications and rules, you can visit the official CME Group website.