Oil & Gas Corner

Thursday, 2026-09-10 · covering the last 24h

Market signal

Brent settles above $101, WTI near $97, as Iran vows a "more intense" war. Both benchmarks extended their rally for a fourth straight day after a senior Iranian official said Tehran would escalate further rather than back down, while President Trump said the conflict would likely run past the November 3 midterms and that meaningful pump-price relief won't arrive before then. Bloomberg (paywall) · Energy Connects

EIA: crude stocks dip, gasoline and diesel build on strong refining. The delayed weekly report (pushed a day by the Labor Day holiday) showed commercial crude inventories off 0.4 million barrels to 424.1 million — in line with the five-year average — while gasoline stocks rose 1.27 million barrels and distillate 2.09 million barrels as refinery inputs climbed to 17.6 million b/d; Cushing stocks fell 684,000 barrels. EIA Weekly Petroleum Status Report

Upstream — exploration & production

Widest tanker-war exchange yet: Jordan intercepts Iranian missiles, US downs five more tankers. The US said strikes on five more Iranian-linked crude carriers (the Kaviz, Charminar, Horizon 1, Riesco and Derya) brought its tanker toll for the week to ten, while Iran fired roughly 20 ballistic missiles at Jordan's Al-Azraq air base in retaliation — Jordanian defenses downed 18 with no casualties reported — and separately claimed, without US confirmation, to have hit two American destroyers and eight more tankers. Al Jazeera

Asia's oil buffer is running dry. Months of drawing down strategic and commercial stocks let Japan, South Korea, India and Southeast Asia absorb the Hormuz disruption without matching the West's price pain, but analysts and regional refiners say that cushion is close to exhausted just as China's crude imports remain roughly a third below pre-war levels, leaving importers more exposed to the next price leg. Asia Times

Midstream — pipelines, LNG & shipping

Hormuz ship traffic craters to its lowest since May. The ten-day average of commodity vessels transiting the strait fell to roughly 10 a day, down from more than 15 on Friday, as owners pull tonnage back from the Gulf following this week's tanker strikes — a sharper pullback than at any point since the campaign against shipping began. gCaptain

Fuel-product flows through Hormuz still running at a quarter of prewar levels. Vitol chief executive Russell Hardy told a Singapore trading conference the strait is currently carrying at least 1 million b/d of refined products, versus roughly 4 million b/d before the war (excluding LPG) — a slow recovery that is keeping global fuel prices elevated even as crude flows have partly rebounded. Bloomberg (paywall)

Downstream — refining, fuels & chemicals

Diesel cracks hold near record highs as refining capacity, not crude, becomes the binding constraint. US diesel crack spreads remain pinned above $106/bbl after setting a record earlier this month, with RBN Energy pointing to the loss of refining capacity (US and European closures, plus Russian outages) rather than crude availability as the structural driver of the fuel squeeze. RBN Energy

No new restart timeline or throughput figures for Aramco's 400,000 b/d Jazan refinery since last week's outage; the plant remains down.

The Chatter

Phil Flynn — The PRICE Futures Group ("The Energy Report"): Flynn amplifies Energy Secretary Chris Wright's argument that lost refining capacity, not crude supply, is now the real constraint behind stubbornly high gasoline and diesel prices, framing years of plant closures as a bigger drag on pump prices than the war itself. Post

Eric Nuttall — Ninepoint Partners (CTV News/BNN Bloomberg): Nuttall says the oil market is in "very, very dangerous territory," arguing the risk of a sharp further move at the pump is rising faster than public attention to the war would suggest. Video

HFI Research (Substack): in "This Cannot Be That Obvious," HFI pushes back on Goldman's assumption that Gulf output glides back to prewar levels by late 2027, arguing that tanker attacks — the single most unpredictable variable in the whole forecast — are being treated as a rounding error rather than the swing factor they are. Post