Global oil prices could breach the $100 (£74) a barrel mark within days, and reach $150 a barrel by the end of the month, without a solution to the severe disruption in crude flows through the strait of Hormuz, Goldman Sachs has warned.
Oil exports via the vital trade route linking the world’s biggest oil producers to buyers in the global market have fallen further than the US investment bank had initially expected after the US-Israeli attack on Iran a little over a week ago.
Goldman Sachs had anticipated that flows of crude through the strait would fall to 15% of normal levels but Iran’s effective blockade on tankers passing through the narrow waterway mean that only 10% of oil cargoes that usually transit the trade route have been able to pass.
The bank, an influential oil commentator, warned that its analysis of trade flows last week suggested the impact was 17 times larger than the peak April 2022 hit to Russia production after the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine, which pushed the oil price to $110 a barrel.
“Based on these new data, developments and the size of the shock, we now think that oil prices would likely exceed $100 next week if no signs of solutions emerge by then,” it said in a note on Friday night.
“We now also think it’s likely that oil prices, especially for refined products, would exceed the 2008 and 2022 peaks, if strait of Hormuz flows were to remain depressed throughout March.”
The international oil benchmark briefly climbed above $120 a barrel in 2022 and reached highs of $145 a barrel in 2008, in both cases leading to severe consequences for the global economy.
The oil price pushed above $90 a barrel late last week, amid the highest weekly gains since the Covid-19 pandemic six years ago, and included a $10 increase on Friday alone.
Oil has risen further on brokerage IG’s weekend markets, where US crude traded at more than $94 a barrel on Sunday. That indicates the oil price will rise once financial markets reopen.
“The grace period given by the market to the Trump administration expired at the end of last week,” according to Clayton Seigle, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“A deficit of 20m barrels per day (mb/d) is hitting global [oil market] balances with no sign of relief. To the contrary, President Trump is demanding unconditional surrender, a very unlikely prospect. While observers may have initially thought his disregard for painful oil prices was a bluff, it’s now clear that it isn’t,” he said.
Overall, oil prices have rocketed by more than 50% so far this year, having begun 2026 at about $60 a barrel. Prices had already risen in January and February, before accelerating after the US-Israeli attack on Iran just over a week ago.
Fears of a global oil shortfall were compounded late last week by Qatar’s energy minister, who predicted that if the war continued unabated all Gulf energy exporters would be forced to shut down production within weeks and oil would rise to $150 a barrel.
Oil storage facilities in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait are reaching their limits, meaning major oilfields may need to be shut down if crude cannot be exported via the strait of Hormuz to the global market.
Hundreds of tankers attempting to transit the strait have come to a halt after Iran’s Revolutionary Guards threatened to “set ablaze” any vessel using the trade route, which carries a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas.
Seigle warned that exports of oil and gas from the Middle East would not resume “until shipowners, operators and insurers feel sufficiently safe from the threat environment posed by Iranian warships and aircraft, missiles, drones, speedboats and naval mines”.
The White House has suggested countermeasures such as rerouting Saudi crude via the Red Sea, drawing on emergency US crude reserves or extending government-backed insurance to shipping companies. However, Seigle added that this would not be enough to offset the loss of 20m barrels of oil a day “or anywhere in that ballpark”.
