Oil Speculators

From CNNMoney (via Tim Duy via Economist's View):

Schork notes that speculators now own nearly six times as many barrels of oil – 268,622 futures contracts representing nearly 269 million barrels – as can be stored at the WTI trading hub in Cushing, Okla. And since the CFTC numbers released Friday only go through last Tuesday, they likely underestimate the degree of speculative fervor building in the energy markets.
Olivier Jakob, who covers energy markets for Petromatrix in Zug, Switzerland, estimates that traders added 40,000 to 50,000 crude contracts to their long positions in the second half of last week. That would take them up to seven times the Cushing capacity, a level he calls "extraordinary."
The speculative fervor is so remarkable that the big trading firms now have nearly twice as many long contracts open as they did in 2008, when oil spiked to $147 in the summer, a development that either foreshadowed or caused the global economic meltdown, depending on how you look at it.

Things are getting interesting.  Would these long contracts contribute to some of the difference between West Texas and Brent prices?  It would seem wrong that extra long contracts would push down the price, but if oil must be delivered there, but there isn't enough storage so it gets dumped on the market, maybe all of those contracts in excess of storage would contribute to depressing the West Texas price.