Barclays is maintaining its 2026 average Brent crude oil price forecast at $100 a barrel though risks are skewing higher, the bank said in a note on Friday. In trading on Friday, Brent futures were at about $105 a barrel as investors doubted the prospects of a breakthrough in U.S.-Iran peace talks, while the key Strait of Hormuz stayed closed. Around 20% of global energy supplies transited the strait before the war, and the conflict has removed 14 million barrels per day of oil - or 14% of [Read more]

As prices for physical crude oil hit all-time highs of over $160 per barrel last month, analysts and traders alike rushed to predict a market Armageddon if the U.S.-Iran war dragged on and the Strait of Hormuz stayed closed. Five weeks later, with the strait still largely shut and peace talks at an impasse, prices have not risen but have instead fallen to $100-$110 a barrel. The fall was driven by several factors: Chinese refiners slashed refining runs and also reduced imports and instead [Read more]

A diplomatic deal between the United States and Iran would be unfeasible if Tehran implemented a tolling system in the Strait of Hormuz, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on Thursday. "No one in the world is in favor of the tolling system. It can't happen. It would be unacceptable. It would make a diplomatic deal unfeasible if they were to continue to pursue that. So it's a threat to the world if they were trying to do that, and it's completely illegal," Rubio said. He also [Read more]

U.S. underground natural gas storage capacity of the 375 active storage fields in the Lower 48 states increased in 2025, according to an annual report by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) on Thursday. The EIA uses two metrics to assess storage capacity: demonstrated peak capacity, which rose 0.1%, or 6 billion cubic feet (bcf), in 2025, and working gas design capacity, which rose 0.6%, or 26 bcf, last year. One billion cubic feet of gas is enough to supply about 5 million [Read more]

When Donald Trump warned Iran on April 7 that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” a European diplomat in Washington said his government wanted an urgent answer to a chilling question: Was the U.S. president contemplating the use of a nuclear weapon? Across Europe and Asia, the concern went beyond whether Trump’s apocalyptic threat was real or bluster. One fear, the diplomat said, was that Russia could seize the moment to justify similar threats in Ukraine, triggering a nuclear crisis on [Read more]

The start of peak summer fuel demand combined with the lack of new oil exports from the Middle East and depleting stocks could push the oil market into the "red zone" in July-August, the head of the International Energy Agency said on Thursday without elaborating. The world entered the oil supply crisis caused by the Iran war with a surplus of oil, which helped to absorb the shock, but now stocks are now eroding, Fatih Birol said in a speech at Chatham House in London. In March, the [Read more]

Shale producer Devon Energy on Thursday said it has acquired 16,300 net undeveloped acres in the core of the Delaware Basin in New Mexico for about $2.6 billion through a federal lease, strengthening its position in the top U.S. shale basin. The deal comes weeks after Devon closed its $58 billion merger with Coterra Energy, as producers consolidate to cut costs and boost scale. The Delaware Basin, part of the broader Permian Basin spanning West Texas and New Mexico, remains the most [Read more]

China continued to build its massive stockpile of crude oil in April, even though imports dropped to the lowest in nearly four years. China's surplus crude amounted to about 430,000 barrels per day in April as the 20% drop in imports was outweighed by refinery processing sliding to the lowest since August 2022. The ongoing building of inventories by the world's biggest crude importer underlines that China is in quite a different situation to the rest of the world, which is burning through [Read more]