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Kuwait has declared force majeure on shipments of crude oil and refined products after a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz prevented some vessels from entering the Persian Gulf, hindering its ability to meet certain customer commitments, Bloomberg News reported on Monday, citing a document. State-run Kuwait Petroleum Corp. notified customers on Friday that it was invoking a contract clause allowing it to withhold scheduled deliveries, the report said. It added that the decision is not [Read more]

Phillips 66 and Kinder Morgan have secured enough long-term shipper commitments to move forward with a proposed pipeline project to supply fuel to Arizona and California, they said on Monday. The Western Gateway Pipeline project comes as companies race to build a major new fuel pipeline to the U.S. West Coast ahead of planned refinery closures in California, a relatively isolated fuel market with limited pipeline links to major refining hubs, leaving it vulnerable to supply disruptions and [Read more]

The U.S. military has directed 27 vessels to turn around or return to an Iranian port since the beginning of its blockade around the Strait of Hormuz, U.S. Central Command said in a statement on X on Monday. (Reporting by Katharine Jackson and Doina Chiacu; editing by Michelle Nichols) [Read more]

OTTAWA - The annual rate of inflation accelerated to 2.4 per cent in March as the war in Iran sent fuel costs soaring, Statistics Canada said Monday. That’s a jump of more than half a percentage point from the headline inflation rate of 1.8 per cent in February, though economists had widely expected the March figures to come in a tick higher. Iran’s move to close of the Strait of Hormuz in response to U.S. and Israeli attacks and ongoing uncertainty over ceasefire talks has sent global [Read more]

Shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remained at a virtual standstill on Monday with just three crossings in the space of 12 hours, according to shipping data. The oil products tanker Nero, which is under British sanctions for Russian oil activities, left the Gulf and was sailing through the Strait, according to satellite analysis from data analytics specialists SynMax and tracking data from the Kpler platform. Two other ships - a chemical tanker and a liquefied petroleum gas [Read more]

A consistent theme in global oil markets since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran is that the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz will be short-lived, and therefore so will the disruption to the supply of crude and refined products. That expectation has consistently been reflected in pricing for crude oil futures, which have risen sharply since the conflict began on February 28, but are still well short of the highs reached in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In effect, the [Read more]