President Donald Trump on Saturday said that peace with Iran is at hand and the Strait of Hormuz will reopen.
We’ll see. Trump has become the president who cried peace. After repeated fakeouts over the past three months, the market has begun to ignore Trump’s play-by-play. Instead, it is awaiting tangible signs of an agreement with Iran.
Iran has played hardball on fully reopening the strait — its main piece of leverage throughout a war in which it was overwhelmed, militarily. But Iran has used speed boats, mines and improved drones to block the strait to tankers, starving the global economy of a fifth of its oil.
But if this really, truly is the end of the war and the strait is about to reopen, what happens next?
When will prices return to where they were before the war?
Not anytime soon. Almost certainly not this year. Maybe never.
Once the strait has truly reopened, a logistical nightmare is about to unfold.
Step one: Clearing the strait’s bottlenecks. That’s going to take a long time, since tankers move about as fast as you can ride a bicycle.
First, the 166 or so tankers stuck in the Persian Gulf that need to clear out, carrying around 170 million barrels of oil with them, according to Matt Smith, lead oil analyst at Kpler. That will make way for empty tankers to enter the strait, load up and head back out.
A return to full tanker transit capacity could take up to three months, according to Victoria Grabenwöger, senior oil analyst at Kpler.
Step two: Drawing down stockpiles. Empty ships will first draw oil from the warehouses that have been filled — because producers had nowhere else to put it.
The good news: Refiners were pragmatic about their storage and never fully filled their stockpiles. That should reduce some of the time it would otherwise take to reboot pumps. But fuller-than-typical inventories will nevertheless delay getting oil production back up to full capacity.
Step three: Restarting production. Middle Eastern oil wells were largely shut off during the war. Turning on production isn’t like flipping a switch. It’s a complex engineering challenge that involves serious physics and labor of up to several weeks.
Production will need to be restarted — slowly — to ensure reservoirs of crude don’t collapse, requiring re-drilling and substantial repairs. Water and gas injected into wells need to be rebalanced, which is a tricky business.
Because wells in the region are large and close to one another, restarting production will require significant coordination across companies and countries to ensure injected water and gas pressure remain consistent across multiple wells.
Step four: Making repairs. A number of refiners, natural gas producers and some oil producers were damaged during the war. Some repairs to the damaged critical infrastructure could take years to complete, oil companies said.
There’s a lot of oil to get back online: 12 million barrels per day of crude output and 3 million barrels of refined petroleum products have been shut across the Middle East — mostly in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, according to Kpler. That’s no easy feat.
All of that assumes the war is over and there are no further disruptions in the strait. And we all know what happens when you assume…
The past few months have been filled with many peace fakeouts, leading traders to keep oil prices high. On April 18, Iran agreed to reopen the strait, but hours later, it determined the United States and Israel had violated their end of the bargain and once again began firing on ships attempting to pass through.
Oil traders will watch how the situation unfolds over the next several weeks and months to see whether Iran is truly ready to give up the strait. If so, will Iran stop charging tolls for ships to pass through? Will the administration continue to blockade Iranian oil, or will it give in to Iran’s demand that the blockade be lifted as a precursor to peace?
Also, shipping companies will need to feel comfortable actually sending their vessels through the strait. Last time the strait (very briefly) reopened, ships raced to get out, only to turn around quickly when they got word that it had become unsafe.
Insurance companies have sent marine coverage prices surging by thousands of percentage points, and they may be unwilling to offer affordable coverage while the situation remains precarious.
Iran had threatened to mine the strait, and previously directed ships to traverse through a designated route — and only if they received permission to pass. Ships may be unwilling to take on that risk.
What happens to oil and gas prices?
Traders have tried several times to test a new floor for crude, but it hasn’t settled below $94 a barrel since mid-March. Brent crude futures settled at a little over $100 a barrel on Friday, and if traders are optimistic about peace progress, they may try to test the lower limits when trading resumes Monday evening.
JPMorgan analysts, who expect the strait to open toward the beginning of June, expect oil to average $97 a barrel throughout the rest of the year. Historically, Brent needs to be in the $60 range for $3-a-gallon gas, noted Michael Green, chief strategist at Simplify Asset Management. The futures market currently doesn’t anticipate that happening until 2032.
The longer this peace lasts, and the more evidence that production is rebooting, the lower oil prices could go.
But that’s a lot of “ifs.”
Iran has already cast doubt on Trump’s statement that ships will be able to freely pass through the strait again.
“Although Iran has agreed to allow the number of passing vessels to return to pre-war levels, this in no way means ‘free passage’ as it existed before the war,” Iran’s state news agency Fars reported.
We’ll see.
