What if a Keystone pipeline rupture strands Canadian crude?
A prolonged Keystone shutdown strands Canadian heavy at Hardisty, widening WCS discounts while Gulf Coast heavy-sour tightens and WTI-Brent narrows; the precise trade is long WTI/heavy-sour cracks, not Brent which the map over-weights. Directly rhymes with the Dec-2022 Milk River rupture and the 2025 North Dakota spill, which spiked PADD2/Cushing spreads and refinery margins but moved global flat price little. Transmission: Canada supplies ~60% of US crude imports; forward angle: thin Cushing inventories in 2026 make a Cushing squeeze more violent than prior ruptures.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 0–6 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. A major Keystone crude spill in the Dakotas triggers a prolonged shutdown, stranding Canadian heavy barrels. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Oil supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.