Brent Tops $100 for First Time Since July 24 as Iran Strikes Jordan Air Base, CPC Terminal Hit by Drones

Wednesday, September 9, 2026 | 6:40 AM ET

Brent (November) $100.73 | WTI (October) $95.25 Brent +$2.81, touching $100.95 intraday, WTI +$2.22. The IRGC struck Jordan's Al-Azraq Air Base with ballistic missiles, per Fars, targeting maintenance hangars and shelters housing U.S. fighter jets; Jordan's army said it intercepted 18 of the missiles with two others landing in uninhabited areas. CPC's Black Sea terminal at Novorossiysk was hit by drones Wednesday morning, damaging the tanker Seaviolet at the third mooring, though it completed loading and the mooring itself appears undamaged.

Bottom Line

Capital Economics' Hamad Hussain flagged the mechanism most worth watching from here: the real question isn't this week's headlines individually, it's whether the attacks on oil tankers reduce ship-to-ship transfers in the Gulf of Oman, since those transfers have been the main thing keeping oil flowing to global markets and capping prices throughout this conflict. Rystad's Claudio Galimberti's numbers show how much is riding on exactly that mechanism holding up: Hormuz flows hit 8-9 million bpd in the week before fighting resumed August 30, double the prior week, but have since fallen below 2 million bpd. That's a bigger swing than almost any single data point cited in recent weeks, and it's the clearest evidence yet that the ship-to-ship workaround system is now genuinely strained rather than just under theoretical threat.

Jeff Currie's framing is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as a hot take: he's arguing the market is still trying to treat this as a one-off spike when it's actually structural, a security premium that isn't going away and will keep growing. Whether or not that view proves right, it's notable that Goldman, Bank of America, and HSBC have all raised forecasts in recent days, and Goldman's own note this week explicitly built in the assumption that Mideast shipping disruptions continue through 2027, not just through this current escalation. The IEA's separate estimate that global oil supply falls 4.3 million bpd this year, about 4%, gives a scale to what "structural" means in practice.

China's teapot refiners are approaching a genuine capacity constraint, not just a cost squeeze. Vortexa's Emma Li's math is specific: if independent refiners keep drawing down Iranian floating storage near Malaysia at the current pace of roughly 1 million bpd, those offshore holdings could be exhausted by mid-October, which would likely force run cuts starting next month. Energy Aspects' Jianan Sun adds that teapot margins have already collapsed from about $10 a barrel in early July to breakeven, and specifically can't afford a full shift to mainstream grades at current price levels, that combination of thin margins and a hard supply deadline is a sharper squeeze than the general "China imports remain below normal" framing captures. The added wrinkle this week is Venezuela: teapots now face pressure on both their Iranian and Venezuelan supply simultaneously, the latter from the redirection of flows following Washington's intervention there, leaving fewer discounted alternatives just as the Iranian floating stock clock runs down.

Morgan Stanley's Brendan Ross gave a useful structural read on how the trading community itself is adapting, separate from the price level question. Traders are compressing their positioning into three-to-six month horizons and getting more "clinical" about which risks they'll hold, deliberately shedding exposure they don't want rather than carrying broad long-dated positions. That's feeding a liquidity problem specifically in longer-dated contracts, since less participation begets less liquidity there. His point that the physical-financial dislocation has landed hardest in product markets, not crude, matches everything else this week has shown: record U.S. diesel, a deepening European shortage, and refining margins at multi-year highs, all pointing to products as the tighter and more persistently strained side of this market.

Japan's decision to earmark ¥385 billion ($2.5 billion) to begin replenishing its strategic reserves next fiscal year is a small but telling signal of how governments are now planning around this conflict as a multi-year reality rather than a temporary shock. Tokyo's reserves have fallen to 103 days of demand from 146 days before the war, drawn down specifically to cushion the initial disruption given Japan sourced over 90% of its crude from the Middle East before February. A major consuming nation now budgeting to rebuild its buffer, rather than waiting for a resolution to do so, fits the same "this is structural" read Currie is making about price.