Brent cleared $100. WTI settled $96.

Brent cleared $100. WTI settled $96.

ICE Brent settled at $101.21 a barrel Wednesday, up 3.4%, after touching $101.58. NYMEX WTI settled at $96.05. First Brent settle above $100 since July.

By Victor Lin

The move is ships, not speeches. The U.S. military said it destroyed five Iranian tankers after Iran tried ballistic missiles on a U.S. Navy warship. Iranian media said Tehran hit two U.S. warships and eight oil tankers in the Persian Gulf; that second claim had no immediate confirmation in the same Bloomberg write-up. Houthis hit Saudi energy facilities. Hormuz is the choke. The tape priced it.

Newsquawk had the same settles — WTI up $3.02 to $96.05, Brent up $3.29 to $101.21 — with session highs at $96.82 and $101.58. DTN’s Barani Krishnan matched those closes. Seventh straight up day for New York crude in other market recaps of the same session.

The government map moved the same day. EIAs Short-Term Energy Outlook, reported by Reuters, raised 2026 Brent to about $91 a barrel average, nearly 5% above the prior forecast, and WTI to $84.65. Global inventories are down about 400 million barrels year to date and still falling, EIA said. Middle East shut-ins hit 6.7 million barrels a day in August, from 5 million in July, and average about 5.7 million barrels a day in the fourth quarter in that outlook. Pre-conflict output and exports do not fully return until the second quarter of 2027 in EIA’s path. The STEO was finalized Sept. 3 — before this week’s shipping strikes — so Wednesdays $101 Brent settle is already above the annual average the agency just printed.

TD Securities’ Ryan McKay, in the World Oil piece, said dark flows eased the crude deficit some, but “the market remains tight overall.” Vortexa had oil on water down more than 150 million barrels since mid-July. EIA’s STEO also lifted fourth-quarter U.S. retail diesel to $5.55 a gallon, up 14% in that revision, with diesel stocks heading for a multi-decade low.

My take: $96 WTI and $101 Brent are a Hormuz shipping print with an inventory underwrite. The annual STEO averages ($91 Brent, $84.65 WTI) are not the Wednesday screen. If tanker attacks keep stacking, the settle can hold a three-handle premium to the government year average. If dark crossings and workarounds scale without new hits, the crack between the STEO path and the cash close is the trade. Watch the ships and the next weekly stocks.