Pure speculators betting on price don't take delivery - at some point, depending on their time horizon, they take profits.

The far off futures contracts generally have relatively low "open interest" (long and short positions) compared to those nearby.

You can access Open Interest information for any futures contract from the underlying exchange. In the case of the CL crude contracts, its Nymex:

http://www.nymex.com/ewd_fact_sheet.aspx

You'll note that the far off futures contracts have more open interest in the peak usage months.

Speculators, energy companies, airlines, etc all play in the futures market. Its no different than the Orange Juice market that the movie "Trading Places" made famous - traders are working on behalf of both commercial organizations (growers/consolidators, industrial consumers of the products) as well as pure speculators.

Its impossible to tell from open interest numbers alone "who" or what type of speculation (production hedging vs raw speculation) is going on. There are firms that try to quantify how much activity is generated by the commercial interests vs pure speculators - myself I'm not particularly interested in who is buying or selling, just what price they are willing to execute trades at. Certainly its true the pure speculators can have shorter time horizons and are more easily spooked by adverse price movement - but knowing this doesn't help much in the big picture, because there's no identification of motive or goal or intent between traders.