$100 Oil Is Back

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Luke Vargas (0:22)

The Persian Gulf oil shock is here. We'll get the latest as prices top $100 a barrel and attacks on infrastructure escalate.

SPEAKER_4 (0:30)

The growing number of strikes between Iran and all of its neighbors, including Israel and the US., have increasingly taken on a new target in this war, which is critical infrastructure.

Luke Vargas (0:40)

Plus, what Iran's new supreme leader tells us about the country's eagerness to keep fighting. And President Trump's sons back a new drone company banking on sales to the US military. It's Monday, March 9th. I'm Luke Vargas for the Wall Street Journal, and here is the AM Edition of What's News. The top headlines and business stories moving your world today.

Oil prices have crossed a hundred dollars a barrel for the first time since Russia's invasion of Ukraine rattled oil markets in 2022 The Journal's Joe Wallace has been tracking the war with Iran's impact on oil markets. He joins us now with the latest. Joe, I guess we can say it now. It has been a history-making week for oil markets, US futures registering their biggest weekly rise ever. We've got Brent and West Texas Intermediate Crude having both spiked today to almost a hundred and twenty dollars a barrel, though they have settled down a little bit from there. Just walk us through the movement we're seeing in energy markets and why, as you and your colleagues reported over the weekend, all of this amounts to the Persian Gulf oil squeeze that many people had long been fearing.

Joe Wallace (1:49)

I think when the war broke out, there was a degree of complacency in the oil market. The market thought that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz was the boy that cried wolf. This didn't happen last year even during the 12-day war. Likewise, Iran had mostly in the past refrained from attacking regional energy infrastructure. By the Sunday after the attack, it was clear that both of those assumptions were out of the window. But even so, it took the market until really Friday to realize the full implications, especially of the closure of the strait, which is that with nowhere for the oil to go, massive producers in the region were going to have to cut production because they don't have enough space to store the oil. And Kuwait, for example, simply hadn't built much storage space down the years because its oil fields are close to the coastal ports. And the assumption was this oil would just flow out to the market. And that's clearly no longer the case.

Luke Vargas (2:39)

You've reported that the straits are not technically closed, but you only need to look at the number of ships in the Gulf waiting to pass through to kind of get a read on effectively what the situation is.

Joe Wallace (2:49)

Precisely. The Iranian messaging has been mixed. The Iranian delegation to the United Nations said last week this raid is open, but at the same time ships in the region have reported receiving radio messages purportedly from Iranian naval captains saying don't pass through. The IRTC has warned that ships from Europe and Israel and the US are legitimate targets. And as of Sunday, at least nine ships had been attacked and one sailor had been killed. So you can see why most ship owners don't want to go through right now.

Luke Vargas (3:21)

And on top of that, there is a fear, a growing fear, seems well founded that disruptions to infrastructure are going to continue. This is something that our correspondent Thomas Grove has been watching and he filed this update for us.

SPEAKER_4 (3:32)

This weekend, we really saw an uptick in attacks on critical infrastructure in the Gulf. We saw Israel taking aim at Iran's oil depots, which has left clouds and fire in the air, black rain that's being caused in Tehran. And most recently, we've seen an Iranian attack near a Bahrain oil refinery that has left 32 civilians injured. And then over the weekend, we saw a very new critical phase of this conflict, which is countries going for each other's desalination plans. And this is very important because the region depends on desalinated water for its drinking water for its economies, basically to grow and function. Now, these countries have been stockpiling water for years. They have critical reserves of this stuff. But some of the smaller nations like Bahrain, for example, which was struck over the weekend, they don't have huge reserves. In fact, some analysts say that even over a number of days, those stocks could be drawn down and you could see a crisis in the country.