Prices for U.S. crude oil for May delivery turned negative Monday — something that has never happened since oil futures began trading in 1983.

Jim Krane, the Wallace S. Wilson Fellow for Energy Studies at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy, said "the mind-blowing carnage in U.S. oil prices makes little sense in physical terms." He is available to discuss the implications and outlook with the news media.

"Is anyone actually going to pay $30 or $40 to get rid of a barrel of crude oil? I doubt it," Krane said. "But with storage full, there’s no way to take delivery of these end-of-period physical shipments.

"It seems that the oil market's trading algorithms have no way to express the deluge other than in prices run amok,” he said. “It's a bit like the millennium bug situation come to fruition in oil markets. The contortions in the trading system aren't properly reflecting the physical market."