{"id":395194,"date":"2026-03-20T15:52:14","date_gmt":"2026-03-20T15:52:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/395194\/"},"modified":"2026-03-20T15:52:14","modified_gmt":"2026-03-20T15:52:14","slug":"oil-and-gas-prices-volatile-as-international-energy-agency-warns-of-severe-energy-crisis-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/395194\/","title":{"rendered":"Oil and gas prices volatile as International \u200cEnergy Agency warns of severe energy crisis \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Oil prices<\/a> resumed their upward trend on Friday as the International \u200cEnergy Agency<\/a> chief Fatih Birol warned \u200c that it could take up to \u200bsix months to restore oil and \u2060gas flows from the \u200cGulf, \u200csaying \u200bthe world is facing what could \u2060be \u200bthe most severe \u200benergy crisis in \u200chistory.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt will be six \u200bmonths for some (sites) to \u2060be \u2060operational, others \u200bmuch longer,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Birol, in a Financial Times interview, said politicians and markets were underestimating the scale of the disruption, with \u200caround one-fifth \u2060of global oil and gas supplies effectively stranded \u200cin the region. <\/p>\n

Brent crude traded near $109 (\u20ac94) a barrel, up by about 6 per cent this week, after closing at the highest since mid-2022 on Thursday. Oil prices have swung on average by more than $10 a day since the war began, with open attacks on energy infrastructure heightening volatility. <\/p>\n

Gas prices continued to be volatile, though not as extreme as those experienced on Thursday which saw surges to levels not seen in three years, while the European Central Bank said a prolonged disruption would push euro-zone inflation to 6.3 per cent and trigger a brief recession. <\/p>\n

Already, the price hikes have added \u20ac7 billion ($8.1 billion) to Europe\u2019s energy bills over the past two weeks, according to the European Commission, the EU\u2019s executive arm.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Iran\u2019s economic warfare reshapes battlefieldOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Equity markets turned choppy heading into the weekend, while oil prices cooled as investors weighed efforts by the US and Israel to ease concerns over the Iran war.<\/p>\n

The Europe-wide Stoxx 600 index edged lower on Friday morning but recovered by lunchtime, as the markets pondered a European Central Bank (ECB) rate hike in the near future.<\/p>\n

The ECB kept the policy rate unchanged on Thursday, but policymakers expect to discuss \u200chikes in \u2060the coming months as the Iran war pushes up inflation in the euro zone.<\/p>\n

\"\"The difficult choices that could dramatically increase housing supply in Dublin<\/p>\n

Among individual \u200cstocks, Unilever shares added 1.2 per cent after the consumer goods group \u200bconfirmed it was in talks with US-based \u200bMcCormick & Company about selling its food business.<\/p>\n

US futures extended a drop on Friday as earlier hopes for a quick resolution to the war in the Middle East <\/a>faded. <\/p>\n

Israel \u200blaunched fresh attacks on Iran a day after US President Donald Trump<\/a> told it not to repeat its strikes on Iranian natural gas infrastructure. <\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said it would no longer target energy infrastructure, and added that the war will end a lot faster than people think, as Iran is no longer able to enrich uranium or manufacture ballistic missiles. <\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Trump <\/a>told reporters he\u2019s \u201cnot putting troops anywhere\u201d after being asked about the possibility of deploying ground troops.<\/p>\n

Traders are parsing every geopolitical headline as the conflict has upended the energy supply chain. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe long shadow of the energy crisis is far from lifted,\u201d said Hebe Chen, a senior market analyst at Vantage Global Prime in Sydney. \u201cIt would be naive to call this anything more than a fragile exhale.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trading in Asia was thin on account of holidays in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. Japanese markets were also shut, meaning there was no cash trading in Treasuries during Asian hours.<\/p>\n

The risk of a global inflation shock has also complicated the policy outlook for global central banks. Investors in bond markets around the world are rushing to bet on higher interest rates amid the jump in energy prices. -Bloomberg\/Reuters<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Oil prices resumed their upward trend on Friday as the International \u200cEnergy Agency chief Fatih Birol warned \u200c…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":395195,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[174],"tags":[8472,6222,79,2190,356,179,18,15912,19,18929,17,9951],"class_list":{"0":"post-395194","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-alibaba","9":"tag-binyamin-netanyahu","10":"tag-business","11":"tag-cost-of-living","12":"tag-donald-trump","13":"tag-economy","14":"tag-eire","15":"tag-energy-crisis","16":"tag-ie","17":"tag-iran","18":"tag-ireland","19":"tag-oil"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116262308852762496","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=395194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395194\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/395195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=395194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=395194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=395194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}