Oil & Gas Corner

Tuesday, 2026-10-06 · covering the last 24h

Market signal

EIA lifts its Brent forecast on the Hormuz premium, but flags the smallest Gulf shut-ins since the war began. The agency's October Short-Term Energy Outlook, published Tuesday, raised its Brent forecast to an average of $105/bbl for the fourth quarter — up $14/bbl from September's STEO — on the assumption that Strait of Hormuz flows stay constrained through year-end, while the same report put Middle East crude shut-ins at 4.8 million b/d in September, the lowest since the conflict began and down from 5.8 million b/d in August and a 10.9 million b/d peak in May, as convoys, bypass routes and ship-to-ship transfers keep whittling the disruption down. EIA STEO

Upstream — exploration & production

No distinct major, NOC or shale-independent news surfaced in the window; the supply story of the day is the Gulf export recovery detailed below, and OPEC+'s eight-country panel isn't due to reconvene until November.

Midstream — pipelines, LNG & shipping

Iran ramps up Hormuz tanker strikes even as oil and gas flows climb back toward prewar levels. UKMTO has logged nine attacks on vessels in the Strait of Hormuz and the wider Persian Gulf so far this month — already half the total it recorded for the whole of September — even as Bloomberg and CNBC report crude and LNG shipments through the strait recovering toward their pre-war run-rate, with Saudi Arabia and the UAE routing more cargoes back through the Gulf under US naval escort; the divergence between rising attacks and rising flows is keeping war-risk insurance and freight costs elevated regardless of how the headline export numbers look. UKMTO · Bloomberg (paywall) · CNBC

Downstream — refining, fuels & chemicals

No refining outage, startup or margin-moving development surfaced in the window.

The Chatter

The regular sector commentariat stayed quiet on today's split between rising Hormuz attacks and rising Hormuz exports: Doomberg, HFI Research, Commodity Context, Super-Spiked, Art Berman, Goehring & Rozencwajg and Javier Blas's own feed turned up nothing distinct on either story by the time this edition closed.