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SamuelTheThird

(1,042 posts) Wed Mar 18, 2026, 11:01 PM 10 hrs ago

$200 Oil No Longer Crazy Idea as Middle East Supply Collapses

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Oil-Prices/200-Oil-No-Longer-Crazy-Idea-as-Middle-East-Supply-Collapses.html

A month ago, any analyst suggesting international oil prices could soar all the way to $200 per barrel would have been laughed out of the studio. Now, some are beginning to acknowledge that this is a real possibility, and with good reason.

Oil and fuel exports from the Middle East stood at 25.13 million barrels daily in February, Reuters reported this month, citing data from Kpler. By mid-March, this had plummeted by close to two-thirds, to 9.71 million barrels a day. Vortexa has even more worrying figures, putting the February daily average at 26.1 million barrels of crude and fuels, and the mid—March average at just 7.5 million barrels daily.

Yet even worse than daily shipments is the situation in production. Everyone in the Middle East is cutting oil production—and those wells take a while to restart. The reason they are cutting is that storage capacity is limited—and some of those “export” barrels are actually going on tankers for storage rather than shipment to clients. A fifth of global oil, in other words, is severely disrupted, and even if the bombs stop flying tomorrow, it will take a while for things to get back to normal.
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“We’re very much in the $150 range but I don’t think it’s ridiculous at all to [suggest] $200. It would be very fair given we are basically having a crisis-a-day right now equivalent to supply outages,” Onyx Capital Group CEO Greg Newman told CNBC this week, noting that the Middle Eastern oil benchmark had already hit $150 per barrel amid the supply squeeze.