• The world is awash in oil that nobody wants, causing storage tanks around the world to fill up at historic rates.
• Knowing exactly how much oil is in those tanks is worth a lot — because the more supply, the cheaper the oil.
• Orbital Insights, a startup backed by heavyweights like Alphabet’s GV and Goldman Sachs, has an unusual way of figuring it out involving satellite imagery, radar, and computer vision.
• The result is one of the largest oil inventories, which shows an increase of a stunning 130 million barrels in oil inventories in just the last 30 days.
• Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

As the sun passes over Cushing, Oklahoma, it casts dark shadows across dozens of white oil tanks that surround the small southern town, known as the nation’s largest oil hub.

If you know what you’re looking for, those shadows can tell you a lot, such as the size of the tank and how full it is. With those two numbers, you can figure out precisely how much crude oil is in each one of them.

That information is valuable because oil is valuable. Traders, analysts, and energy companies go to great lengths to figure out how much …continued .
[Source: Business Insider]