🛢 The Strait of Hormuz Oil Shock Is About to Head to the West
The biggest oil supply shock in history has reached the one-month mark. Prices have surged, growth forecasts are being cut worldwide, and shortages are emerging across Asia, from Thailand to Pakistan.
But the energy industry is warning that the crisis is only beginning.
In conversations with more than three dozen oil and gas traders, executives, brokers, shippers and advisers over the last week, one message was repeated over and over: The world still hasn’t grasped the severity of the situation. Many drew parallels with the 1970s oil shock, warning the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is threatening an even bigger crisis. Fuel crunches hitting Asia will soon start spreading west, they said. Europe is likely to face surging prices to secure cargoes and is at risk of diesel shortages in the coming weeks.
If the strait stays closed, the world will have to significantly reduce its oil and gas consumption — but not before prices spike to a level that forces consumers and businesses to fly, drive and spend much less. Already, demand has begun to drop, and some countries in Asia are hoarding and rationing fuel. US government officials and Wall Street analysts are starting to consider the prospect that oil prices might surge to an unprecedented $200 a barrel.
“It’s clear to me if this crisis lasts more than three or four months it becomes a systemic problem for the world,” Patrick Pouyanne, chief executive officer of TotalEnergies SE said at the CERAWeek conference in Houston. “We cannot have 20% of the crude oil, which is exported globally, stranded in the Gulf and 20% of the LNG capacity stranded, without any consequence.”
A simple back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests the closure of the strait is reducing global oil flows by some 11 million barrels a day, after accounting for the interventions so far aimed at offsetting the loss. When compared with pre-war demand levels, that leaves a roughly 9 million-barrel shortfall — a yawning gap that is more than the oil consumption of the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy combined. Lower demand, particularly in Asia, is already helping to force a closing of that gap. (The market also entered the war in a surplus.)
But for supply this may be as good as it gets. A massive emergency stockpile release and US waivers on Russian and Iranian oil sanctions have bought some time, but they are finite interventions. Once they’re exhausted, it’s not clear what further tools President Donald Trump has to keep global oil prices from surging in the near term – other than fully reopening the strait. Iran has been allowing a trickle of foreign ships to pass through the waterway, but the numbers so far do little to move the needle.
But it’s not just fuel: petroleum is used to make plastics, which are used in just about everything.
Looking more broadly, with oil around $110 a barrel, Bloomberg Economics SHOK model projects a marked but manageable boost to prices and blow to growth. In the euro area, those numbers are about 1 percentage point on annual inflation and 0.6% off GDP.
But if the Strait of Hormuz stays closed too far into the second quarter, the risk is that oil prices move sharply higher. At $170 a barrel, the impact on inflation and growth roughly doubles — a stagflationary shock that could shift everything from the path ahead for central banks to the outcome of the US midterm elections.
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