Brent Slides to $100.24, Lowest Since September 10

Monday, September 21, 2026 | 7:00 AM ET

Brent (November) $100.47 | WTI (October, expiring Tuesday) $97.12 | WTI (November) $92.93

Brent -$3.41, expiring October WTI -$3.18, November WTI -$3.15. Both benchmarks touched their lowest since September 10 on hopes for diplomatic movement around this week's UN General Assembly, where Trump said he'd be open to meeting Iranian President Pezeshkian. Satellite data cited by JPMorgan shows Saudi crude moving through Hormuz averaged 2.9 million bpd over the past six days, up from just 700,000 bpd in August. Houthis said they struck "sensitive" sites in Riyadh and an Aramco facility in Yanbu Saturday; Iran's Revolutionary Guards warned of new weapons and untouched targets if the U.S. launches fresh strikes.

Bottom Line

JPMorgan's read on the Saudi pivot is the number that matters most this morning: crude moving through Hormuz averaging 2.9 million bpd over the past six days versus 700,000 in August is roughly a fourfold increase, and their analysts called Middle East flows "surprisingly strong" given the East-West pipeline is still down. The tanker data backs this up in detail. In the week of September 13, 22 tankers carrying 42 million barrels exited Hormuz, with Saudi Arabia and Iraq each accounting for 43% of that volume, and there have been no visible loadings at all from Yanbu since September 16, confirming the Red Sea route remains fully sidelined while Hormuz absorbs the shift. This is Saudi Arabia actively routing around its own damaged infrastructure at scale, not just managing the margins.

Set against that recovery, the diplomatic backdrop remains genuinely mixed rather than clearly improving. Trump's openness to meeting Pezeshkian in New York is a real gesture, and Iran's security chief Mohsen Rezaei said Tehran has passed its conditions to mediators for re-engaging in talks. But Iran and the U.S. also traded fresh threats Sunday, and the IRGC's warning about new weapons and previously untouched targets if Washington strikes again is a harder line than the mediation talk suggests. China pressing Iran to help contain the Houthis, after Saudi Arabia appealed directly to Beijing following the Riyadh and Yanbu attacks, is a new and notable data point, it suggests Riyadh is now working multiple channels simultaneously rather than relying only on Washington to manage the Houthi threat.

The traffic numbers show a market that's adapting rather than normalizing. Weekend Hormuz crossings fell to 17 from 37 the prior week, and pre-war the strait handled around 125 large commercial vessels daily versus today's trickle. But specific transactions visible in the data show how barrels are still moving: the VLCC Pinios exited Sunday and was transferring 2 million barrels of Iraqi Basrah crude to the New Constant off Fujairah Monday, bound for China, and a Qatari LNG cargo aboard the Shandong Redwood transited out September 19 heading to Pakistan. Bab el-Mandeb saw 51 crossings over the weekend, down from 57 the prior weekend but still functioning, including an Aframax carrying about 700,000 barrels of Saudi crude, evidence that even with Yanbu shut, some Red Sea-bound cargo still finds a way through.

Russia's refining capacity took its most serious hit yet from Ukraine's drone campaign. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said the city fended off more than 1,600 drones since Saturday, including 450 aimed at Moscow itself, in what he called a deliberate attempt to disrupt the final day of parliamentary elections. Despite that defense, drones reached a Moscow refinery that processed 11.6 million metric tons of crude in 2024, producing 2.9 million tons of gasoline and 3.2 million tons of diesel, damaging part of the facility and killing three people when a separate strike hit an apartment building. This happened despite Trump's announcement Monday that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to stop hitting each other's energy infrastructure, an agreement that in practice appears to have had no effect on either side's targeting.