The price of oil in the USA has entered negative value for the first time in history.
Basically, this means that the suppliers of oil are now actually paying people to take the commodity off their hands due to fears that they could run out of places to store it as early as May.
The demand for oil has completely dried up since much of the world has been under lockdown and therefore people are staying inside.
As a result of that lack of demand, oil companies have been forced to rent storage space to keep the oil, which has now pushed the price below zero dollars for the first time ever.
At one stage, the price of barrel of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) which is seen as a bellwether for oil coming from the United States, dropped to as low as minus $37.63 (minus £30.31) per barrel.
This drastic change in the value of oil is in part due to a technicality of the global market by which oil is traded on future value.
May futures contracts are supposed to end on Tuesday, so traders have been quick to get rid of their holdings so as not to then have to find somewhere to store the oil and incur the storage costs.
Stewart Glickman, an energy equity analyst from CFRA Research, told BBC News: "This is off-the-charts wacky.
"The demand shock was so massive that it's overwhelmed anything that people could have expected."
Outside of the May prices, the WTI prices for June are also down, although they remain above $20 (£16.12) per barrel.
Brent Crude, which is used as the benchmark for oil prices in Europe and the rest of the world and is already trading on June contracts, is down 8.9 percent at less than $26 (£20.95) per barrel.
Glickman added that these prices could also fall if much of the world remains in lockdown conditions.
He continued: "I'm really not optimistic about the prospects for oil companies or oil prices."
The business lobby for the UK's offshore oil and gas sector, OGUK, said that the negative prices for US oil would have a knock-on effect on firms that operate in the North Sea.
OGUK boss Deirdre Michie said: "The dynamics of this US market are different from those directly driving UK produced Brent but we will not escape the impact.
"Ours is not just a trading market; every penny lost spells more uncertainty over jobs,"
However, this does mean that oil is cheaper at the pumps - although, Glickman rightly added: "The silver lining is, if you for various reason actually need to be on the roads, you're filling up for far less than you would have been even four months ago.
"The problem for most of us is even if you could fill up, where are you going to go?"
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