We’re in a slow-motion fuel crisis, already baked into the counterfactual petroleum supply gap. Even if the Iran War ended, immediately and completely and unambiguously, the fuel crisis would still be happening.
How will humanity respond to this?
Leaders, governments, corporations, individuals, and militaries are all notoriously hard to predict. This is the thread for trying anyway.
(Note: This thread is about the petroleum supply disruption downstream of the Iran War, not the Iran War itself. oil production and distribution would not recover to prewar levels for months or years.)
Crude oil has one of the deepest futures markets in the world. What do traders on these markets think will happen to the price of oil?
In late Feb 2026, before the Israel–Iran war began, Brent crude was about $70 per barrel.
Today Brent is about $94–95 per barrel.
The Brent futures market is pricing oil about six months from now at roughly $82–84 per barrel.
The Brent futures market is pricing oil about twelve months from now at roughly $78–80 per barrel.
That doesn’t sound too bad.I don’t know how to interpret those numbers though, so I searched for statements by people that do. I found thathttps://www.iea.org/topics/the-middle-east-and-global-energy-markets#:~:text=The IEA’s Executive,oil market.
There’s a conspiracybrained answer that “they’re pushing down the futures”, but like… who? With what money?
However, there’s also a mass-human-ignorance answer that “the traders put more stock in the Trump Iran Deal Imminent press release cycle than they should”.
Or like, maybe they expect a bloody ground invasion to restore Hormuz and production capacity… that also wraps up everything within a year?
Am interested in others’ thoughts here (possible leading-indicators to look for, alternative hypotheses, etc), that’s what this thread is for!
One key question to model: How long until certain operational minimums are tripped in the US? (Explanation: Refineries and other facilities can’t run with a too-small nonzero amount of oil.)
I would conjecture that this would never happen due to this particular war.
Basically, the US is currently a net exporter of oil (unlike some earlier periods in its history), and the government can impose export restrictions if necessary.
My crux here would be “Imagine whoever’s in charge of (keeping oil broadly available within the nation, with export controls). Do they have the motivation (or, uh, the Revealed amount of strategic foresight) to do this? Or might they know-a-guy who could get richer by selling more-expensive oil to fewer people?” (See comments on that 2nd link, for more discussion of the obvious and less-obvious nuances.)
Yes, I actually think that currently the White House is happy about the ability of US oil companies to capture new markets and to reap some windfall profits and is not overly concerned with higher prices.
But I am pretty sure that if the things start getting really bad (and the economical and political price to pay for all this starts to mount), they’ll impose some export controls (the alternative being to stop the war before they want to stop it, and even that might potentially not work, because Iran might potentially decide not to open the strait no matter what). Everything has a price, and the government is not invulnerable, especially if its own narrow political base (the “MAGA”) rebels.
Yep. I also wonder what (if any) kinds of short-term signals we may be able to see ahead of time on the relative strengths of these factors. Or, I guess, the economic/political “price-to-pay” factor is easy to measure, but “what kind of offers are the oil execs making him back there?” is hard to measure.