One of the remarkable things about the crisis in Venezuela has been the oil industry’s ability to survive even while the rest of the economy faces a state of collapse.

The country’s production has indeed fallen to levels not seen for decades, but still managed to keep daily output north of 1 million barrels per day.

It’s only the dog days of summer, but the early candidate for story-of-the-year in the oil market might well be the Permian Basin bottleneck.

Quarterly earnings out this week renewed attention on the outsized role that a lack of pipeline capacity in West Texas and New Mexico has played on oil companies’ bottom line.

A discount for WTI crude in Midland, Texas versus Cushing, Oklahoma has meant different things for different companies.