Brent Holds Near $93 as Survey Sees War Premium Capped Around $100

Brent Holds Near $93 as Survey Sees War Premium Capped Around $100 A Bloomberg Intelligence survey shows participants expect crude averaging $81 to $100 over the next year, even with front-month Brent trading below that mark. Front-month ICE Brent crude traded at $92.75 on Wednesday (2026-06-10), up 0.36% on the day and still below the $100 line that has become the market's reference point for the US-Iran war. NYMEX WTI sat at $89.84, up 0.58%. Both are well off the panic highs of mid-May.² Oil market participants are increasingly pricing crude to be capped near $100 a barrel over the next year, according to a Bloomberg Intelligence survey, as demand is forced to slow to offset millions of barrels of lost supply. A majority of respondents expect Brent to average $81 to $100 over the next 12 months. This is a market that has absorbed the shock and now trades a range, not a spike.² The war was violent for price. Brent surged more than 55% from around $72 a barrel on February 27 to nearly $120 at its peak, CNBC reported, as fears mounted over disruption through the Strait of Hormuz. The move since has been a steady bleed lower, punctuated by headline-driven jumps.⁶ One of those jumps came on Sunday (2026-05-17), when Brent rose more than 30% intraday and topped $119, Al Jazeera reported, as US and Israeli strikes stoked fears of prolonged supply loss.⁴ The rallies have not stuck. On Thursday (2026-05-14), front-month ICE Brent added 1.18% to close at $108.65 after briefly climbing above $119, reversing once Israel said it was helping reopen the Strait of Hormuz, according to CNBC. WTI slipped 0.19% to $96.14 the same session. By the following week the contracts were set for a roughly 6% weekly decline, ending two weeks of gains, Montel reported.^5,1 The reopening of Hormuz is the swing factor. The strait carries the bulk of Gulf crude and LNG, and headlines about it closing or reopening have driven the sharpest intraday moves of the war. QatarEnergy CEO Saad al-Kaabi said the Iran attack took out 17% of the country's LNG export capacity, a reminder that the gas-side disruption is real even where crude has stabilised.⁵ The infrastructure damage gives the bullish case its floor. Survey respondents expect global supply disruptions to average 3 million to 7 million barrels a day, with few anticipating outages above 10 million, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. That range explains the near-$100 ceiling: large enough to keep a war premium in price, not large enough to force the disorderly spike that the February rally implied.² On the other side sits inventory. Swiss bank UBS projects stockpiles could fall near a record low of 7.6 billion barrels by the end of May, a draw that would normally argue for higher prices, not a capped range. The International Energy Agency has flagged record inventory depletion. With front-month Brent still below $100 against that draw, demand destruction is doing the balancing work the survey describes.^3,2 Supply growth is the longer counterweight. The US Energy Information Administration projects US crude output will climb to a record 14.1 million barrels a day in 2027, capacity that does nothing for a Hormuz outage now but caps the curve further out.² Positioning has turned defensive. About a quarter of survey respondents expect an increase in hedging and risk-management activity, against 15% who see more opportunistic risk-taking, Bloomberg Intelligence found. That is a market protecting books rather than chasing the next leg.² The political tape still moves price. US crude jumped 10% to above $110 on Wednesday (2026-05-20), the first time in over three weeks, after President Trump vowed to hit Iran "extremely hard," the Guardian reported, dashing hopes of de-escalation. Daniela Hathorn of capital.com said markets were increasingly pushing back against the idea that Trump's address signalled de-escalation.⁷ For now the range holds. With front-month Brent at $92.75 and the consensus clustered at $81 to $100, the trade is less about direction than which headline breaks the band. A confirmed Hormuz closure or a step-up in strikes on export infrastructure pushes toward the upper bound; a durable reopening, with inventories this thin, would test how much of the premium was ever about barrels and how much about fear. Watch the strait, and watch whether the next disruption headline still moves price the way the May ones did.^2,3⁵