Oil prices were steady in a volatile session Thursday as traders assessed the escalating conflict between the United States and Iran and the potential disruption to oil supplies. Brent futures were up 26 cents, or 0.29%, to $91.00 a barrel after touching a low of $89.02 earlier, while US West Texas Intermediate crude was down 17 cents to $84.29 a barrel, off a session low of $83.21. YourDailyAnalysis singles out the intraday range itself as more informative than the modest net change: a swing of nearly $2 on Brent within a single session that still closed essentially flat signals traders are actively repricing the conflict in real time without yet settling on a clear directional view.
The military action underlying this volatility is substantial in scope, which explains why the range was so wide even though the net price move was small. The US military said it had hit dozens of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targets in Iran, including military command centres and drone facilities, in a two-hour operation launched after Tehran fired ballistic missiles at US forces in the Middle East. YourDailyAnalysis marks “dozens of targets” and “two-hour operation” as details that establish scale before assessing market reaction: strikes of that breadth and duration are the kind that would typically move oil sharply higher on their own, which makes Thursday’s comparatively contained net price move more notable, not less.
A market analyst’s framing of the core pricing dynamic identifies exactly why the risk premium isn’t fading despite the news volume. “Until safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz is no longer a gamble, the risk premium in oil is not going anywhere – hope for diplomacy is welcome, but the market is pricing the reality of ongoing strikes,” said Tim Waterer, chief market analyst at KCM Trade, adding that “even though crude continues to move through alternative routes, transit through the Strait of Hormuz remains something of a roll of the dice at best.” YourDailyAnalysis sees Waterer’s “alternative routes” comment as the detail that most complicates a simple binary read of this conflict’s oil impact: some crude is still moving, just not through the traditional, lowest-cost corridor, which means the market is pricing elevated logistics risk and cost rather than an outright supply stoppage.
A second maritime chokepoint entering the risk picture is the development that most changes the calculus from prior weeks of this conflict, and it’s a genuinely new variable. The conflict has also disrupted shipping through the Bab el-Mandeb strait, creating a second pressure point for global oil flows alongside the Strait of Hormuz, with Yemen’s Houthi group reportedly considering imposing fees on commercial ships sailing through the southern Red Sea, a week after declaring a naval blockade on Saudi Arabia. YourDailyAnalysis registers this second chokepoint as the reason oil’s risk premium may prove stickier than a single-strait disruption would produce on its own: traders now have to price simultaneous risk across two separate maritime corridors rather than treating Hormuz as the sole geographic variable determining how much crude can move safely.
A third, less-publicized disruption adds still more pressure on top of the two straits, and it points to a Black Sea route investors may not have been watching as closely. Tankers planned for loading at the Caspian Pipeline Consortium terminal are heading away from the Black Sea after a vessel was hit during loading at the terminal Thursday, according to shipping data and people with knowledge of the matter, while a Capital Economics analyst separately noted that “given the disruption to flows through several maritime chokepoints, as well as the rapid depletion of oil inventories, prices could feasibly be even higher than where they sit currently.” That inventory-depletion point is a meaningful addition to the chokepoint story: even if shipping routes eventually stabilize, the oil that would have been produced and stored during the disruption doesn’t get replaced retroactively, which is a separate and slower-resolving supply constraint than any single route reopening.
Watch whether Thursday’s confirmed Qatari LNG tanker transit through the Iran-designated Hormuz route, made with Tehran’s stated permission according to Iranian state media, becomes a repeatable pattern for other shipments or remains an isolated, negotiated exception. The Caspian Pipeline Consortium vessel strike is the detail most likely to matter for prices in the coming days, since it opens a third distinct disruption front beyond the two straits already dominating the conflict’s oil-market narrative, and Black Sea-origin barrels rerouting away from that terminal would add supply pressure that isn’t currently priced into most published forecasts.
