Commodity markets produce a particular kind of story when supply gets tight, and the story always sounds the same: the buffer is gone, the cushion has vanished, the system is about to seize. The current version has a name, tank bottoms, referring to the minimum crude volume required to keep oil moving from wellhead to refinery at all.

The claim is that the world is approaching it. Like most such narratives it contains something true and a great deal that is not, and separating the two matters because policy decisions are being made on the assumption that the panic is correct.

Indian refiners appear to be preparing a swift pullback from Russian crude, a shift driven less by changing market math than by the new U.S. sanctions slamming Russia’s two largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil. Washington’s measures, its first Russia sanctions package of President Donald Trump’s second term tied explicitly to the war in Ukraine, threaten to sever access to U.S. dollar financing and Western services for any firm that keeps transacting with the blacklisted producers.

New Delhi’s biggest private buyer, Reliance Industries, is already moving to slash purchases and unwind a long-term supply arrangement reportedly covering close to half a million barrels a day, while state run refiners are scouring contracts and compliance paperwork to ensure their cargoes don’t trace back to the newly sanctioned entities.

The U.S. Department of Energy has allocated substantial funding, totaling up to $890 million, for projects focused on demonstrating the viability of carbon capture technologies. The selected projects target natural gas and coal plants in Texas, California, and North Dakota, with the aim…