Brent Up to $107.35, WTI Outpaces Brent Gain, as Saudi Arabia Races to Reroute Barrels Through Hormuz

Tuesday, September 15, 2026 | 6:15 AM ET

Brent (November) $107.35 | WTI (October) $103.53

Brent +$1.67 (+1.6%), WTI +$2.14 (+2.1%). Hormuz crossings fell to four Monday from 10 the prior day. Oman's Maritime Security Centre said the Panama-flagged tanker El Gaia is being towed to port after an engine-room fire from an attack. Half of Russia's six top diesel-producing refineries have significantly cut back or fully halted output this month after drone strikes, with Kirishi fully shut and Volgograd and NORSI running at roughly a quarter of capacity.

Bottom Line

Saudi Arabia's response to the East-West pipeline outage is the more actionable story underneath today's price move. Rather than simply absorbing the loss, Aramco has been raising shipments through Hormuz itself in the first ten days of September and is now trying to push that further, according to a person familiar with the plans. Total exports had climbed to near 4 million bpd in early September, split roughly 1 million through Hormuz and the rest via Yanbu, before falling to about 3 million bpd in August, the lowest in at least nine years per Bloomberg, Vortexa, and Kpler data. Satellite images reportedly show more tankers loading at a major Gulf export terminal, and more than a dozen Saudi vessels have been staged just outside the strait in recent weeks, positioning that predates last week's attacks and suggests this shift was already underway before the pipeline forced the issue. The catch is capacity to actually move the extra volume: freight to China from Saudi Gulf ports hit nearly $1 million a day Friday, a record, so any pivot toward Hormuz runs straight into the same vessel shortage that's been driving rates up across the board.

The repair timeline itself remains genuinely unsettled depending on the source. The Associated Press reported Monday, citing two regional officials, that the pipeline will be down for several weeks; U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said he expects it running again "very soon." Analysts tracking the flow data noted the April attack on the same pipeline caused only a brief, four-day disruption of about 0.7 million bpd, but flagged that this strike may be more severe and could threaten the remaining roughly 2 million bpd of Yanbu-bound exports specifically, given the same analysts' repair estimates span from days to eight weeks. That kind of two-order-of-magnitude uncertainty is itself informative: nobody outside the repair crews seems to actually know yet, and the range of possible outcomes for global supply is correspondingly wide. Those same analysts flagged the infrastructure attacks as a genuine escalation that raises the odds of a scenario where Brent moves above $120, contingent on 2027 Gulf output staying materially below pre-war levels.

The production math behind the price move is worth grounding in actual numbers rather than the headline swings alone. Average external estimates now put August Persian Gulf crude output down 1.2 million bpd from July, implying total losses versus February near 7 million bpd, with Saudi Arabia's own production slipping on the dual Eastern and Western shipping disruptions while Iraq and the UAE continued ramping up on rising dark crossings. The resulting global deficit estimate has widened to somewhere between 1 and 3 million bpd for August depending on methodology, up from a nearly balanced market in July. Options markets are pricing that shift too: the implied probability of the February Brent contract expiring above $100 has jumped 18 percentage points over the past month to 44%.

Russia's diesel damage adds a second, largely separate source of pressure on the same product market already showing up in $6+ U.S. pump prices. The IEA's tally that a Russian refinery has been successfully hit on average every three days over the first eight months of the year gives real scale to what's driving Moscow's export restrictions: diesel exports before this year's disruptions ran about 2.5 million tons a month; June exports, after the attacks intensified, fell below 1 million tons. Turkey and Brazil had been taking at least half of available Russian cargoes before July's restrictions, leaving both buyers exposed to the same tightening squeezing everyone else. Trump's weekend appeal to Zelenskyy to stop hitting Russian diesel infrastructure, because the fuel shortage is "hurting the world," reads as a direct acknowledgment that the Ukraine war's energy impact is now bleeding into the same inflation and midterm-timing pressures as the Iran conflict; Ukraine's own position, that refineries are legitimate military targets, hasn't changed, and Zelensky confirmed a fresh strike on the Syzran refinery along with hits on a drone facility in Taganrog and a launch site in Oryol overnight, suggesting no near-term pause on that front regardless of the request.

Two smaller flow signals worth noting briefly: OECD SPR draws have slowed to just 0.3 million bpd over the past month, with the U.S. now the only country still drawing while Japan and South Korea have begun rebuilding, and China's crude imports remain about 4 million bpd below year-ago levels even as its refined product exports have picked up, both signs that the buffers which absorbed much of this year's shock are shifting rather than simply depleting further.