The price of oil has pushed back above $100 a barrel, driven by a new front in the disruption of global energy shipping: a Houthi blockade of the Red Sea, Al Jazeera reports.
The price move
The headline number is the return to triple digits.
According to Al Jazeera, Brent crude futures rose to $100.65 a barrel on Thursday, an increase of $6.58, or nearly 7 percent, and the first time the benchmark has traded above $100 since late May. For readers watching the pump rather than the futures market, Al Jazeera reports that US gasoline is averaging $4.09 a gallon and diesel $5.34, and cites the analyst Patrick De Haan of GasBuddy projecting a further rise of 10 to 20 cents a gallon over the next week or two.
Two chokepoints at once
What is unusual, and what the market is reacting to, is that two of the world's critical oil passages are constrained simultaneously.
Al Jazeera reports that Yemen's Iran-aligned Houthis declared a naval blockade on Saudi shipments on Monday, pledging to target "Saudi, Israeli, and United States-linked tankers" in the Bab al-Mandeb strait, the chokepoint linking the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean. On Thursday, Al Jazeera reports, they attacked two Saudi oil tankers, one of which was confirmed ablaze.
That comes on top of the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran closed in retaliation for US and Israeli attacks, and which previously carried close to a fifth of the world's traded oil. With Hormuz shut and Bab al-Mandeb under threat, two of the arteries the global oil trade depends on are disrupted at the same time.
An uncertain blockade
The market's difficulty, analysts say, is that the rules of the blockade are not clear.
Al Jazeera quotes Michelle Bockmann, a senior maritime intelligence analyst at Windward, describing the Houthis as "quite mercurial" and noting that "there is no complete clarity on what the blockade means." She observed that Chinese-operated vessels have been allowed to pass, suggesting that "enforcement is calibrated to affiliation rather than cargo," in other words, that who owns or flags a ship may matter more than what it is carrying. That ambiguity is itself a cost: shipowners cannot easily price a risk whose terms keep shifting.
Why it matters
This is the economic face of a widening conflict, and it reaches ordinary households.
The Red Sea blockade is the latest strand of the US-Israel war on Iran, which since it reignited this month has spread from missile strikes to the world's shipping lanes. When tankers reroute or stop, the cost is paid globally, in the price of fuel, freight and the goods that move by sea. newsparlor is tracking this conflict through its many threads, from the strikes themselves to the frozen-asset dispute to the diplomacy around it; the oil price is the thread that lands, sooner or later, at the filling station and the supermarket shelf.
