Lots of oil in Cushing

Oklahoma energy officials often talk about the glut of oil in storage at Cushing.

Cushing is the pricing hub for the New York Mercantile Exchange and home to countless oil storage tanks.

Producers have complained for the past several years that oil stored there is losing value because there of a lack of pipeline capacity away from Cushing. That is why they’ve talked up projects like the Keystone XL and Seaway pipeline reversal.

Those projects are getting closer to fruition, but that still leaves a lot of oil in storage at Cushing.

 The Cushing terminal held 36.18 million barrels of oil last week, the most it has had since July, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration figures cited by Zacks.com in its weekly analyst blog.

The storage hub peaked at 41.9 million barrels of oil in April 2011, according to the blog.

To put those figures in some perspective, oil-focused Continental Resources Inc. reported it produced 22.6 million barrels of oil equivalent in 2011.

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