Brent Extends Above $100 to $102.72 as VLCC Rates Hit Record Near $800,000/Day

Thursday, September 10, 2026 | 6:40 AM ET

Brent (November) $101.66 | WTI (October) $97.04

Brent +0.45, WTI +0.99, up nearly 30% from early August lows. Iran said it attacked 10 ships near Hormuz Wednesday after the U.S. sank five Iranian oil tankers, the largest shipping attacks of the six-month conflict; the IRGC vowed to escalate further if attacked again. Dated Brent has traded above $100 since September 3, per LSEG. The benchmark VLCC rate from the Middle East to China has hit a record near $800,000 a day.

Bottom Line

The tanker rate spike is the most concrete evidence yet of how much this conflict is now costing to route around, separate from the crude price itself. Fearnleys' framing captures the mechanism precisely: it wouldn't be shocking to see the WS 400 mark breached on a Fujairah-East run, because the VLCC positions list is now that tight, and the underlying problem hasn't gone away, Iran has actively increased its efforts to stop oil moving through Hormuz. Equinor's Alex Grant, speaking at the APPEC conference in Singapore, put it plainly: there are multiple bottlenecks happening simultaneously right now, not just one. The mechanism is straightforward once you see it: Saudi Arabia routing cargoes north through the Red Sea and Egypt's Mediterranean ports instead of the shorter Hormuz-Gulf of Oman path ties up each tanker for far longer per voyage, which shrinks the effective available fleet and pushes rates up even though, as oilprice.com noted, the crude supply itself is actually there, it's the shipping of it that's become the genuinely risky and expensive part. The U.S. Gulf Coast-to-Asia lump-sum charter now runs $29.5 million per voyage, before war-risk premiums or delay costs are even added.

China's role in whether this rally holds is the question analysts keep returning to, and this week's data adds real texture to it. ING's framing is the cleanest summary: continued Chinese buying could amplify any further supply shock and push prices higher, while a pullback would cap the gains, so the direction of Chinese demand is now arguably as important as the direction of the conflict itself for where price goes next. Kpler's Muyu Xu expects seaborne imports to climb to 8.5-9 million bpd from July's 7 million, still well below the roughly 10 million bpd pre-war level, but a real directional recovery nonetheless. The APPEC conference itself is producing an unusually direct signal of how urgent that buying has become: nearly 10 Chinese independent refiners sent larger, more work-focused delegations this year specifically to track down available cargoes, described by one senior trader as less about networking and more because "they're short of oil."

The mechanics of that scramble are worth walking through because they show teapots being squeezed from multiple directions at once. Sinopec and Yulong Petrochemical are absorbing the bulk of Russian ESPO out of Kozmino, pushing independent refiners into the spot market for alternatives, where premiums have moved sharply: Djeno crude from Congo, previously trading at a discount as recently as June, is now fetching about $22 a barrel over Brent for November delivery, partly attributed to high freight costs. Canadian heavy crude via the Trans Mountain pipeline has traded at a premium too, and even ESPO itself, when teapots can get it at all, is going for around $12 over Brent for November, with traders expecting December levels to climb further given this week's tanker strikes have tightened Middle East supply even more. Total teapot purchases from West Africa, Canada, and Colombia already exceed 20 million barrels over recent weeks, and the incentive to keep buying is reinforced by two structural factors beyond simple availability: state refiners need to replenish stockpiles to levels Beijing requires as a condition for keeping their own export volumes high, and independents are racing to use up annual import quotas before year-end.

Put together, the tanker rate story and the China buying story are really two sides of the same tightening market, more barrels being sought by more buyers, moving on fewer available ships taking longer, more expensive routes. That combination is a more durable source of upward pressure than any single day's headline from the Gulf, and it's consistent with the "structural, not one-off" framing several analysts have been offering this week.