Conflict in the Middle East is disrupting a significant share of global energy supplies and has triggered the most severe energy crisis in the past 40 years, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said on Wednesday. "In the context of the current Middle East conflict, this affects at least 20 million barrels per day. This is the volume of oil and petroleum products that used to pass through the Strait of Hormuz every day, as recently as 19 days ago," he said. (Reporting by Olesya Astakhova; [Read more]

Saudi Arabia's crude exports in January rose to 6.993 million barrels per day from 6.988 million bpd in December while crude output hit its highest since April 2023, data from the Joint Organizations Data Initiative (JODI) showed on Wednesday. The world's largest oil exporter, Saudi Arabia currently faces trouble exporting as war in Iran reduces tanker traffic out of the Gulf to a trickle. Saudi production in January stood at about 10.100 million bpd, the JODI data showed, up from 10.084 [Read more]

U.S. crude stocks rose last week, with flows from Venezuela and Mexico hitting their highest levels since 2024, while gasoline and distillate inventories fell, the Energy Information Administration said on Wednesday. Crude inventories rose by 6.2 million barrels to 449.3 million barrels in the week ended March 13, the EIA said, compared with analysts' expectations in a Reuters poll for a 383,000-barrel rise. Crude stocks at the Cushing, Oklahoma, delivery hub rose by 944,000 barrels in the [Read more]

Iran issued an evacuation warning for several oil facilities across Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar, saying they would be targeted by strikes "in the coming hours", Iranian state media reported on Wednesday. The warning was directed at Saudi Arabia's Samref Refinery and Jubail Petrochemical Complex, the United Arab Emirates' Al Hosn Gas Field, and Qatar's Mesaieed Petrochemical Complex, Mesaieed Holding Company and Ras Laffan Refinery. "These centres have become direct and legitimate [Read more]

A U.S. plan to help control global oil prices with a swap of millions of barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve depends on energy companies returning oil back to the facility with high premiums in the form of additional barrels, which some traders said could deter participation. The exchange is part of a wider agreement by countries in the International Energy Agency to release 400 million barrels of crude from reserves in an effort to tame prices that have risen during the [Read more]

President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are betting the oil-price shock sparked by the Iran crisis will be too short-lived to hurt them politically in November, but traders and industry analysts see signs that U.S. pump prices will stay painfully high long after any diplomatic breakthrough. Oil prices have surged as the conflict disrupted global supply. U.S. crude topped $100 a barrel for the first time since the 2022 Russia-Ukraine shock. U.S. diesel climbed above $5 a gallon, its [Read more]

Central banks have good reason to sit up and take notice of how this month's oil shock is hitting inflation expectations. Yet financial market pricing shows a split picture so far. It looks like a one-two punch: a near-term cost-of-living burst that subsides again over the longer term. The core debate in a week packed with major monetary policy meetings is whether an inflation spurt warrants interest rate rises - or whether central banks should treat the Iran-related energy supply shock as [Read more]