LONDON \u2014 Oil prices were near six-week highs on Monday, creeping closer to $100 a barrel, as tit-for-tat strikes between \u200bthe U.S. and Iran on vessels sailing in the Strait of Hormuz and other areas kept crude oil flows in the Middle East low.<\/p>\n
Brent crude futures were up 89 cents, or 0.92%, at $97.17 \u200ca barrel by 1333 GMT, having earlier hit their highest point since July 24 at $97.93.<\/p>\n
U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude also hovered near a recent six-week \u2060high at $92.27 a barrel, up 79 cents.<\/p>\n
In Saudi Arabia, \u200bSaudi Aramco’s Jazan oil refinery was attacked on \u2060Monday and the damage is being ascertained, the Financial Times reported, citing two people with knowledge of the matter.<\/p>\n
Monday’s \u200cgains come on top of \u200cBrent rising around 8% last week, while WTI was boosted nearly 10% after the U.S. \u2060and Iran resumed attacks.<\/p>\n
U.S. forces struck three Iranian oil tankers on \u2060Saturday, the U.S. Central Command said, including one off the coast of Kharg Island, an oil export hub.<\/p>\n
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said on Saturday it targeted three oil tankers that were traveling through unauthorized routes in the Strait of Hormuz, as well as three U.S.-linked vessels in other areas.<\/p>\n
The Saturday attacks represented a “major escalation”, said Marisks, a maritime intelligence firm.<\/p>\n
“Commercial tankers are now being deliberately used as instruments of \u200creciprocal economic pressure, substantially weakening the previous distinction between military confrontation and \u200bcommercial shipping,” it added.<\/p>\n
A week ago a Saudi-owned tanker was attacked by Iran, with Saudi Arabia saying two seafarers had died. Oman said on Monday it had evacuated 16 crew members.<\/p>\n
An average of 10 commodity ships transited the Strait of Hormuz per day over the past 10 days, the lowest since May, data from analytics firm Kpler showed on Monday.<\/p>\n
“If tanker traffic begins to slow materially, the market could price in a much larger supply shock. And there are already signs that this is happening,” said Priyanka Sachdeva, \u200bhead of market insights at Phillip Nova.<\/p>\n
Goldman Sachs said oil prices may rally to as much as $120 a barrel if attacks \u200con shipping rise.<\/p>\n
A restricted \u200czone will be \u2060announced outside the Strait of Hormuz in the coming days, said Mohsen Rezaei, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates is building alternative routes for its energy exports and trade to ensure they are not “held hostage” by the ongoing war between the U.S. and Iran, UAE presidential adviser Anwar Gargash said on \u200cMonday.<\/p>\n
OPEC+ kept its oil output policy \u200bunchanged for October at a meeting on Sunday, the producer \u200cgroup said in a statement, as \u2060it needs to agree \u200bon new quotas before deciding its next output steps.<\/p>\n
Contributing: Florence Tan and Sam Li<\/p>\n
\n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LONDON \u2014 Oil prices were near six-week highs on Monday, creeping closer to $100 a barrel, as tit-for-tat…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":282156,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3],"tags":[328,551,550,3528,553,559,34,552,558,42,81,555,556,549,554,547,557,548],"class_list":["post-282155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-iran","tag-business","tag-cars","tag-classifieds","tag-finance","tag-homes","tag-international","tag-iran","tag-jobs","tag-local","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-radio","tag-salt-lake","tag-sports","tag-television","tag-traffic","tag-utah","tag-weather"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/117230536109689441","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=282155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282155\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/282156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=282155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=282155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=282155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}