Oil prices rose for a sixth straight session on Wednesday, as fresh attacks on shipping in two key Middle East waterways stoked fears of a prolonged disruption to the region’s oil supply routes.
Brent crude, the international benchmark, gained 90 cents, or roughly 1%, to trade at $89.81 a barrel as of 07:57GMT, its highest run of gains in nearly two weeks. U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude wasn’t far behind, rising 88 cents, or 1.1%, to $84.08 a barrel, marking its fifth straight day in positive territory.
Both benchmarks had climbed by more than a dollar earlier in the session before paring some of those gains.
The latest bout of buying was triggered by reports overnight that vessels came under attack in both the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait on Tuesday, two chokepoints that, together with the Suez Canal, form the backbone of Middle Eastern energy exports to the rest of the world.
Washington and Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi movement each confirmed separate incidents, though details of the vessels involved and the extent of any damage remained sketchy in early trading.
Adding to the sense of unease, a senior Iranian security official declared that the Strait of Hormuz would remain effectively closed unless the United States agreed to Tehran’s conditions for ending hostilities, chief among them the release of Iran’s frozen financial assets.
The remarks underscored how deeply the conflict has become entangled with broader geopolitical grievances, leaving traders with little visibility into when, or whether, normal shipping traffic might resume.
The numbers tell their own story. Shipping data showed just eight vessels transited the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday, a one-week low, and a fraction of the 125 to 140 ships that typically passed through the waterway on any given day before the war began. For a corridor that normally handles a fifth of the world’s oil consumption, that kind of falloff is difficult for markets to ignore.
There was at least a flicker of reassuring news out of North Africa. Libya’s National Oil Corporation said fires that had broken out at fuel storage tanks in the Zawiya oil complex were now under control, tempering fears of a wider supply disruption from that quarter.
Even as geopolitical risk has driven prices higher, traders are having to reconcile that narrative with a very different story emerging from U.S. supply data. A Reuters poll of analysts had pointed to a drawdown in both crude and fuel inventories last week.
Instead, figures reportedly circulated from the American Petroleum Institute told the opposite tale: crude stockpiles surged by around 9.1 million barrels, a build far larger than forecasters had anticipated, even as gasoline and distillate inventories declined by 1.5 million barrels and 596,000 barrels, respectively.
Analysts at Haitong Futures noted that such a substantial crude build, should it be echoed in the more closely watched Energy Information Administration report due later Wednesday, could take some of the edge off concerns about tight global supply, potentially offering a counterweight to the risk premium currently baked into prices.
The official EIA figures are scheduled for release at 10:30 a.m. ET (14:30 GMT), and traders are likely to treat that data as the next key catalyst for the market’s direction.
Looking further ahead, the EIA’s own projections suggest the current turmoil is unlikely to be a fleeting episode. The agency has forecast that significant disruptions to Middle Eastern crude supplies will persist through the end of 2027, a sobering timeline for an industry accustomed to shorter-lived shocks.
For 2026, the EIA projects Brent crude will average $86.81 a barrel, with WTI averaging $80.88, figures that suggest the agency expects elevated, if not extreme, prices to become something closer to the new normal rather than a temporary spike.
For now, the tug-of-war between geopolitical fear and swelling American stockpiles looks set to keep volatility elevated, with traders parsing every shipping report out of the Gulf alongside every barrel counted in Cushing, Oklahoma.
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
Oil is caught between two opposing forces: escalating attacks on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which threaten to choke off Middle East supply and are pushing prices up for a sixth straight day, versus a surprisingly large build in U.S. crude inventories, which could ease those same supply fears once official EIA data confirms it.
Today’s EIA report at 10:30 a.m. ET will likely determine whether geopolitical risk or oversupply wins out in the short term but with the EIA itself forecasting Middle East disruptions to persist through 2027, the bigger picture points to sustained, elevated oil prices rather than a quick return to calm.
