Brent crude settled Friday at $102.25 a barrel and U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate at $91.11, both holding near their highest levels in months as traders braced for an Oct. 4 meeting at which eight OPEC+ producers will decide how much more oil to pump in November.
Brent is up more than 7% over the past month and roughly 58% higher than a year ago, according to pricing data tracked by Trading Economics. The rally has little to do with demand. Since the U.S.-Iran conflict escalated over the summer, tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has collapsed — to as few as six vessels a day in September, according to Oil & Gas Journal's tracking of transits, down from a February average above 130. Houthi strikes on Saudi Arabia's 400,000-barrel-a-day Jazan refinery and repeated attacks on tankers in the strait have compounded the squeeze, while China has ordered its largest refiners to halt diesel and gasoline exports to protect domestic supply.
Governments have started drawing down their own reserves in response. The G7 has agreed to release roughly 100 million barrels of emergency crude and diesel stockpiles over four months, and the European Union is weighing additional releases. The U.S. has also moved Patriot missile batteries to help shield Saudi and Qatari energy infrastructure from further strikes. Flows out of the Persian Gulf have partly recovered in recent days, which traders say is the main reason prices have eased slightly rather than climbing further.
A Logistics Problem, Not a Supply Problem
That distinction matters for Sunday's meeting. Seven OPEC+ members — Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Algeria and Oman — held combined output steady at 31.01 million barrels a day for October, unchanged from September, at their last gathering. The wider eight-member OPEC+ group meeting Sunday is widely expected to discuss another modest increase for November as it continues unwinding earlier production cuts, though some traders argue added barrels will do little to cool prices if ships keep avoiding the Gulf chokepoint altogether.
The split in outlooks is real: oil-market analysts remain divided over whether OPEC+ will press ahead with another output increase, hold quotas flat to avoid flooding a market that physically cannot move more crude through the strait, or even trim output if the security situation deteriorates further. Whatever the group decides, traders say the Hormuz bottleneck — not OPEC+ policy — will likely remain the dominant price driver into the fourth quarter.
