What if a Texas flaring ban forces Permian oil cutbacks?
A hard Texas flaring ban forcing Permian oil curtailments unexpectedly tightens crude as associated-gas takeaway becomes the binding constraint; long WTI and US-centric cracks is the trade. No clean analogue, but it echoes the periodic Waha-gas negative-price episodes that already pressure Permian economics, turning a gas problem into an oil-supply problem. Transmission: lost Permian barrels tighten Gulf Coast supply and exports to Asia/Europe; forward angle: this is a genuinely novel, self-inflicted supply cut, so unlike geopolitical shocks it has no spare-capacity offset and could structurally lift WTI relative to Brent.
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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 1–3 years 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 hard Texas flaring ban forces Permian oil curtailments, unexpectedly tightening crude supply. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Oil supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.