Saudi Arabia's Dark-Fleet Shuttle Is Quietly Deflating the Hormuz Risk Premium

Saudi Arabia’s Dark-Fleet Shuttle Is Quietly Deflating the Hormuz Risk Premium

Oil fell for a third session and finished the week flat, as the market decided the pipeline closure won’t hit supply as hard as first feared. That’s because tankers now load inside the Gulf, run through Hormuz under US naval escort, then transfer cargo to long-haul VLCCs off Oman’s Sohar port. Saudi has sold roughly 60 million barrels this way for September-October delivery, pushing exports back near pre-crisis levels and cooling prices. The catch: it’s a congested, fragile relay — one attack away from erasing the calm.

#SaudiArabia #StraitOfHormuz #CrudeSupply #TankerShipping #OilPrices

Update: A War-Crimes Finding Just Made Trump’s UN Gulf Meeting Harder to Spin as an Off-Ramp

A UN fact-finding mission concluded there are reasonable grounds to believe US forces committed war crimes in February strikes on a school and sports complex, and the White House rejected the report. The timing matters: this lands right before a reported Gulf Arab-US-Iran meeting around the UN General Assembly next week. Any concession there now reads domestically as bowing to a body Washington just called biased — raising the odds Tuesday produces posturing over de-escalation, the opposite of what’s priced into the Hormuz risk premium.

#Iran #USPolicy #StraitOfHormuz #OilGeopolitics #GeopoliticalRisk

Forget the Next Outage — Gulf Oil’s Tom Kloza Says $3 Diesel Is Gone for 15 Months

Kloza argues prices can keep rising over the next 100 days because the world has lost roughly 7 million bpd of refining capacity — mostly Russian plants hit by Ukrainian drones and Persian Gulf refineries caught in the war — and that $3 diesel is gone for at least 15 to 16 months. That reframes every headline outage — Joliet, Aramco’s pipeline, Russian strikes — as symptoms of a structural deficit, not isolated events. Anyone budgeting for a quick post-winter normalization in diesel and jet fuel is almost certainly wrong.

#DieselMarket #RefiningCapacity #GasolinePrices #OilForecast #CrudeSupply