Five reasons why oil prices haven’t surged higher despite the Iran war

The Iran war has triggered the largest oil supply disruption in history yet future prices are not that high, which has left some investors wondering why. The answer has to do with the oil balance before the war, the response to the disruption, market expectations and whether the futures price is really the best place to look, Wall Street analysts say. The market has lost nearly 1 billion barrels of oil during the ten weeks that Iran has managed to basically close the Strait of Hormuz, the CEOs of Saudi Aramco and Shell said on their first-quarter earnings calls. Morgan Stanley forecasts the market will lose another billion barrels over the course of 2026 due to the time required to restart oilfields, repair refineries and reposition the tanker fleet. "That this is the largest oil supply disruption in the history of the oil market is neither an exaggeration nor controversial," Martijn Rats, commodities strategist at Morgan Stanley, told clients in a Monday note. Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser and International Energy Agency chief Fatih Birol have described the disruption in the same terms. @LCO.1 3M mountain Brent futures over the past three months Yet the international benchmark Brent futures traded near $108 per barrel Tuesday, while U.S. crude oil futures were just above $101 per barrel. These prices are not that high in historic terms with Brent trading above $100 from 2011 to 2014, Rats said. …