Jeff,

Agree in theory. However.....

Building new tanks may be more difficult in practice than in theory, planning permission etc. You still have to pay to access pipelines, etc. Anyone building new tanks is doing it on the Gulf Coast where the real market for crude is, not in Cushing.

Major producers sell forward swaps to banks (Goldman, Morgan Stanley, etc). The banks discount them for interest rates, credit risk, location risk (resource nationalism etc), war risk, etc, etc, etc. Ultimately they get less than spot price on this...

I am not aware of any major producer selling futures strips on NYMEX, margins are too high and liquidity is too low. The banks do all this business and there is constant flow of forward producer selling in the swaps market.

Addendum: a LOT of forward producer business has been done in "costless collars" where producers buy a put option below the market and sell a call option above the market (eg $50 and $80). They are therefore guaranteed a minimum of $50 and a maximum of $80 and take floating price vs NYMEX for anything in between. There has been so much of this business in the last few years that put options are priced relatively higher than call options, known as an inverse risk reversal skew. Crazy, but true, and a reflection of real pricing flows in the market...