Brent oil tops $100 as US-Iran war shows little sign of abating

Charles Gorrivan and Alex Longley, Bloomberg News on Sep 9, 2026

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Brent oil topped $100 a barrel for the first time since July, as fresh tensions between the U.S. and Iran heightened concerns about energy flows through the Strait of Hormuz.

The global crude benchmark rose about 3% in London. The U.S. military destroyed five Iranian tankers in response to attempts to hit a U.S. Navy warship with ballistic missiles overnight, Central Command said.

The conflict has disrupted shipping through the crucial Hormuz chokepoint, though millions of barrels a day of crude flows on tankers sailing undetected have helped keep prices in check. It’s unclear how the latest flareup may affect those ‘dark’ transits.

The escalation comes as Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militants are also attacking energy facilities in Saudi Arabia.

Meanwhile, there’s been a pickup in Chinese crude purchases so far this month. A buying hiatus from the world’s largest importer had been one of the key factors keeping a lid on prices, and the resumption has some key market gauges trading at their strongest levels in weeks.

“The key indicator to watch is whether this will put an end to the heavy shuttling of oil through the Strait of Hormuz,” said Arne Lohmann Rasmussen, chief analyst at Global Risk Management in Copenhagen. “It may not come to a complete halt, but combined with the more aggressive Houthis in the Red Sea and higher Chinese crude oil imports, the global oil market balance appears to be deteriorating again.”

Brent is up around 65% this year. Apart from a brief spike in July, however, futures had traded below the three-digit mark for more than three months as Persian Gulf producers managed to increase exports.

About 10 million barrels a day have been crossing the waterway, roughly half of pre-war levels, Russell Hardy, chief executive officer of trading house Vitol Group, said on Tuesday. He added that an exact figure is hard to quantify and volumes aren’t guaranteed to leave every day.

Refined products such as diesel, on the other hand, have rallied much harder as the Middle East conflict and the Russia-Ukraine war combine to tighten supplies. That threatens to bring about a fresh round of inflationary costs for the world’s central bankers.

“The fundamental picture for products remains bullish with global inventories and reserves deteriorating,” said Darrell Fletcher, managing director for commodities at Bannockburn Capital Markets.

Before the Iran war, about a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passed through Hormuz to global customers.

Despite the ongoing flow of tankers with their transponders switched off, vessels face a persistent threat of attack. Kuwait Petroleum Corp. is sending tankers through the strait “whenever it is safe,” an official said on Wednesday.

The continued disruption means inventories have continued to decline across the globe. Analytics firm Vortexa sees the amount of oil on ships at sea down by more than 150 million barrels since the middle of July.