Oil futures were mixed on Friday but remained on course for a positive week as the United States threatened that its naval blockade of Iran could continue indefinitely. Brent slipped 12 cents, or 0.1%, to $86.95 a barrel, while West Texas Intermediate rose 13 cents, or 0.2%, to $81.38. For the week, the benchmarks were up about 3.4% and 4%, respectively.
The latest risk premium followed stalled ceasefire talks. Washington said on Thursday that it could maintain the blockade and intensify economic pressure on Tehran; Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent indicated that further measures would be announced the following week. The position reduced expectations that normal energy flows through the Strait of Hormuz would return soon, but it did not define a new volume of crude already removed from the market.
Physical traffic provided a more immediate warning. Vessel movements through Hormuz fell below the month’s average while the United States and Iran asserted rival claims over control of the channel. Before U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran began in late February, the strait handled roughly one-fifth of daily global oil and liquefied-natural-gas supplies, making even partial constraints economically important.
Security concerns increased after two vessels belonging to state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company were attacked while transiting the strait on Thursday. The United Arab Emirates condemned the incidents as Iranian attacks. That attribution is a government position rather than an independently established finding, but damage to commercial vessels makes the risk to available shipping capacity more concrete than diplomatic threats alone.
Supply anxiety is being countered by weakening fundamentals. OPEC’s forecasts pointed to slower demand growth, while U.S. crude inventories recorded their largest weekly increase in more than three and a half years. Additional barrels in storage do not resolve a prolonged disruption at a global chokepoint, but they provide a cushion and reduce the urgency with which refiners must bid for immediate supply.
Reports from the International Energy Agency and U.S. Energy Information Administration also indicated that storage was holding up better than feared. The market is therefore pricing two opposing forces: a route whose political and physical reliability has deteriorated, and a demand-and-inventory picture that can absorb part of the loss without requiring a continuous surge in prices.
The difference between the weekly gain and Friday’s nearly flat trade captures that balance. The blockade threat changed the probability of a prolonged constraint, lifting the week as a whole, but new inventory and demand information prevented the risk premium from expanding without limit. Neither the geopolitical case for higher prices nor the fundamental case for lower prices has yet displaced the other.
The next tests are whether Washington implements additional isolation measures, whether tanker traffic falls further, whether the damaged ADNOC vessels affect commercial routing and whether U.S. stocks continue to build. Weekly gains show that the market assigned more value to disruption risk; they do not establish the duration of the blockade or guarantee that oil will hold those advances.
