Brent Crude Hits One-Month High as Hormuz Tanker Traffic Collapses

Brent crude climbed to a one-month high Friday, with September delivery futures trading at $85.92 a barrel — their highest level since June 15 and on pace for a weekly gain exceeding 10 percent — after a seventh consecutive night of US airstrikes on Iran and retaliatory Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps attacks that targeted maritime surveillance infrastructure along the Strait of Hormuz.

The move extends a sharp reversal from late-June lows, when oil markets had retreated toward pre-war levels following the June 17 Memorandum of Understanding. That deal is now void. Traders are repricing the probability of prolonged disruption to the waterway that handles roughly 20 percent of the world’s daily oil supply.

Sanctions deadline passes, tanker count falls

Washington’s window for Iranian oil wind-downs closed Thursday. The Treasury Department revoked a sanctions waiver earlier this month and set July 17 as the final date for crude sales to be unwound, NBC News reported. Any production, delivery, or sale of Iranian oil after that date now carries full US secondary-sanctions exposure for the buyer.

Tanker throughput has fallen in parallel. Only seven vessels crossed the Strait on Wednesday — the first full trading day after the United States reimposed its naval blockade on Iran — down from thirteen transits the previous day, according to Reuters data reported by CNBC. That decline tracks the broader halt in crude and LNG shipments the America Strikes Desk reported Thursday.

IRGC strikes Hormuz surveillance nodes

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps widened the geographic scope of its counterattacks overnight, claiming early Friday to have destroyed a US air-control radar in Oman’s northern Ghanim region and a maritime surveillance radar positioned on rocks inside the Strait of Hormuz itself. The IRGC also claimed strikes against a missile-defense radar and weapons depots at a US base in Kuwait, and against helicopters and reconnaissance aircraft at Bahrain’s Sakhir airbase.

Attacks on Strait surveillance infrastructure carry particular weight for marine underwriters and shipping operators, who rely on real-time monitoring data to assess transit risk and price policies. The degradation of radar nodes along the chokepoint raises uncertainty for vessels attempting to route through the passage and complicates naval coordination in the waterway.

War-risk insurance premiums

The cost of transiting the Strait had been rising sharply before Friday’s strikes. A Howden Re market analysis published in March placed the war-risk premium for a $100 million tanker at between $250,000 and $375,000 per voyage — a level that, across frequent transits, adds meaningfully to the cost of delivered crude. At least nine to fifteen tankers have sustained physical damage since the conflict began, driving claims and pushing premiums higher.

Those elevated costs prompt commercial decisions that tighten physical supply even when production holds. Buyers with alternatives are routing around the Strait via the Cape of Good Hope, adding roughly twelve to fourteen days of transit time and corresponding fuel expense. That lengthening of supply chains squeezes delivered inventory to Asian and European refiners regardless of what upstream production levels show.

Infrastructure escalation and its market implications

President Trump said Wednesday that the United States would expand strikes to Iranian power plants and bridges the following week unless Tehran agreed to return to negotiations. “Next week comes the power plants. Next week comes the bridges,” Trump said, as Stars and Stripes reported. Iran’s energy ministry has already asked citizens to reduce electricity consumption and switch off air conditioners during peak hours, citing grid strain from existing US strikes.

Any expansion of targeting to power generation and transportation infrastructure would affect Iran’s ability to sustain oil exports from remaining production capacity and risks triggering additional IRGC action against Gulf shipping or regional US military installations. The America Strikes Desk reported Friday that Trump formalized the power-grid threat after completing the seventh night of strikes, while the IRGC has stated publicly that conditions for negotiation are over.

Iran warned it would treat any strike on power infrastructure as a “red line” and would retaliate against key Middle East targets, a threat that energy traders are increasingly treating as credible given the pace of IRGC retaliation over the past week.

Outlook

The US Energy Information Administration projects Brent will average in the upper $70s through August and September, a forecast premised on no sustained disruption to Hormuz transit volumes. That baseline now appears optimistic. With seven nights of US strikes completed, the sanctions wind-down deadline passed, and Iran having struck Strait surveillance infrastructure overnight, the conditions that the EIA’s baseline assumed are not currently in place.

Oil analysts cited by Al Jazeera said price spikes outside the upper-$70s range are possible if transit volumes remain depressed. At $85.92, the market is already trading well above that central forecast — and the next round of US strikes has not yet happened.