Oil & Gas Corner

Friday, 2026-09-18 · covering the last 24h

Market signal

Crude falls for a third straight day as Saudi supply hopes outweigh fresh Houthi strikes. Brent settled down about 0.9% near $103.8/bbl and WTI slipped roughly 0.9% to about $101/bbl on Friday, with WTI briefly dipping below $100 intraday, as traders weighed reports of additional Saudi barrels reaching Asian buyers via Oman against a week of escalating Saudi-Houthi exchanges. CNBC

US diesel notches another record, near $6.45 a gallon. AAA's national average pushed past Thursday's $6.39 print as refiners with zero spare distillate capacity remain unable to add barrels into a market already squeezed by the Saudi and Russian outages below. AAA · The Spokesman-Review (AP)

Baker Hughes: US rig count rises for a second straight week to its highest since May 2024. The domestic rotary rig count added four to 595 for the week to September 18, with oil rigs up two to 452 and gas rigs up two to 134, led by gains in the Permian and Williston. Baker Hughes · BOE Report

Upstream — exploration & production

Aramco tells European refiners they get zero term crude next month; Indian deliveries suspended indefinitely. With the East-West pipeline still down, Aramco has notified European term customers of a full October allocation cut and halted contracted deliveries to Indian refiners — a market that normally supplies close to a tenth of India's crude imports — leaving both groups to compete for spot cargoes instead of scheduled term barrels. Bloomberg (paywall) · Business Today

Houthi land grab down Yemen's Red Sea coast opens a second front against Saudi exports. Over the past week Houthi forces have taken the port of Mokha and islands near the Bab el-Mandeb strait, escalating strikes into Saudi territory alongside the pipeline attacks and adding a shipping-choke-point risk on top of the East-West outage. ABC News Australia

Midstream — pipelines, LNG & shipping

Second tanker in as many days reported struck transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Iran's Revolutionary Guard said it hit the Togo-flagged tanker Trend overnight for passing without authorization; UKMTO confirmed a fire 16 nautical miles off Khasab, Oman, that has since been put out, with the crew reported safe and no independent confirmation yet of the vessel's condition. Tasnim (IRGC statement) · The Hill

Downstream — refining, fuels & chemicals

Yaroslavl damage turns out worse than first reported: two primary units down, not one. Thursday's strike disabled the AVT-3 crude unit (about 40% of capacity) at Russia's Slavneft-YANOS refinery, but AVT-4 (33% of capacity) was already offline from an August 28 attack that hadn't fully been repaired — leaving close to three-quarters of the 300,000-b/d plant out of action and no restart timeline given. Ukrinform (Reuters)

ExxonMobil's Joliet refinery misses its restart target, still offline nearly a week on. Power has been restored to the 275,000-b/d Illinois plant, but Exxon has given no new timeline or damage estimate after the flood-related pump failure, and industry tracker IIR Energy's expectation of a restart this week has now passed. The Deep Dive (Reuters)

The Chatter

Doomberg (newsletter): in "Coming to America," Doomberg argues the market is underpricing how long this drags on because Iran and the Houthis have far more pain tolerance than American consumers facing harvest-season diesel above $6.40 — and that repair timelines on the East-West pipeline are close to irrelevant given the Houthis have already shown both the will and the precision to hit it again. Post (paywall)

HFI Research (Substack): in "What Is The Endgame For The Oil Market?", HFI seizes on a JPMorgan note that went viral after Eric Nuttall flagged it — in which JPM's commodities desk admits "we don't have a baseline view" for the first time since the war began — to argue that sell-side houses modeling a return to normal Hormuz traffic are guessing, not forecasting, until someone can say who wins. Post (paywall)

Rory Johnston, Commodity Context (Substack): this week's Oil Context Weekly flags an inventory picture that "leaned unanimously bearish" — moderate-to-large stock builds across every major consuming region he tracks, including a second big light-distillate build in Singapore that has pulled holdings back within their seasonal range — a data point that cuts against the pure-shortage narrative dominating headlines. Post (paywall)