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(OPINION) The only way that we were going to avoid a historic oil crisis was if a diplomatic solution could be found to end the war in the Middle East. Obviously that did not happen.
The “Memorandum of Understanding” has completely failed and the U.S. and Iran are hitting one another really hard. The Strait of Hormuz is going to be closed for the foreseeable future, and now it appears that the Bab el-Mandeb Strait will soon be closed as well. Global oil inventories have been falling for months, and now we have reached a stage where we are going to experience some really severe pain.
Iran has attacked at least 9 commercial vessels over the past couple of weeks, and as a result “nobody is willing to move” through the Strait of Hormuz right now…
The security situation in the Strait of Hormuz has returned to a “worse-case scenario” for oil tankers as Iran has repeatedly attacked ships over the past week, the CEO of a maritime risk services firm said.
“We see the reduction of the volume of transits through the Strait of Hormuz and right now crews of vessels are even more concerned than they were before,” said Dimitris Maniatis, CEO of Athens-headquartered Marisks, at a Lloyd’s List Intelligence briefing this week. “Nobody is willing to move,” Maniatis said.
This is really bad. We are truly going to see how dependent the world really is on oil from the Middle East. Up to this point, we have been okay because there were large commercial oil stockpiles that we could deplete.
But now we are being told that we have “burned through all of the buffers we had”…
Financial Times spoke with energy traders at the end of the week who warned that slowing tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz could trigger a more severe supply crunch than the first round of the US-Iran war because emergency reserves and stockpiles around the world that cushioned the earlier disruption have been mostly depleted. “We’ve burned through all of the buffers we had. Everything,” said one trader. “All of that’s now gone.
Perhaps some numbers will help people understand the situation that we are facing. Before the war, we had approximately 400 million barrels of oil in commercial inventories.
At this point, “we have close to nothing”… Amrita Sen, founder of Energy Aspects, pointed out that heading into the US-Iran war, the global oil market had around 400 million barrels of excess inventories, not including strategic reserves controlled by governments. READ MORE
End Time Headlines is a ministry founded, owned, and operated by Ricky Scaparo, established in 2010 to equip believers and inform discerning individuals about the “Signs and Seasons” of the times in which we live. Ricky authors original articles and curates news from mainstream sources, carefully selecting topics, verifying information, and utilizing artificial intelligence tools to ensure content is both timely and accurate. Every piece is personally reviewed and edited by Ricky to align with the ministry’s mission of providing a prophetic perspective on current events.