Brent touches $109 after Saudi Arabia shuts the East-West pipeline

Brent crude jumped as much as 4.5 percent on Monday, trading as high as $109.29 a barrel, after Saudi Arabia halted the East-West pipeline that carries crude across the peninsula to the Red Sea port of Yanbu. West Texas Intermediate rose as much as 4.2 percent to $104.26. Both contracts were on track for their highest closes since 19 May. Later in the session Brent eased toward $106 after President Donald Trump said Russia and Ukraine had agreed to stop hitting energy targets.

Riyadh said after Friday's close that it had shut the line as a precaution following attacks the previous day. The kingdom blamed Iran-backed fighters operating from Iraqi territory. It has not given a date for a return to normal flows. The pipeline exists to move Saudi barrels to the Red Sea when the Strait of Hormuz is unsafe. With Hormuz already constrained by the Iran war, the East-West route was the remaining large bypass. Industry sources told Reuters that Yanbu storage can cover five to seven days of exports. Beyond that window, loadings slip.

Suvro Sarkar of DBS Bank said that without a repair timetable oil could move toward $120 a barrel in the near term. Janiv Shah of Rystad said the relatively contained first reaction suggested traders still expect inventories to cushion exports for a few days, and that the reaction would change if the outage lasted longer than that cushion. A separate report, citing regional officials, said the line could stay largely out of service for several weeks.

The same Monday session brought a Houthi claim of dozens of missiles and drones against the Saudi air base at Khamis Mushait, and a delayed Iran-Gulf meeting on Hormuz security after Bahrain said it would not attend. Oman had already postponed the Salalah talks. Houthi forces also tightened their hold on islands north of Bab el-Mandeb. Each of those items adds a second shut-in risk: even if Yanbu keeps loading from tanks, tankers still have to clear the Red Sea.

A Hormuz Monitor desk putting live Yahoo Finance prints against a February 2026 baseline of about $72 a barrel counted Brent near $106.27 by 20:07 UTC on 14 September, up roughly 48 percent from that pre-crisis level and about 8 percent on the week. The Brent-WTI spread was $4.42, consistent with a seaborne shock that hits waterborne Brent harder than landlocked U.S. crude. Gold printed above $4,300 in the same snapshot.

Trump's afternoon claim that diesel prices were mostly a Ukraine-war story, not an Iran-war story, is a political sentence. The Monday tape still opened on a Saudi pipeline. Gulf diesel and gasoil exports in August, according to the International Energy Agency, were just over a quarter of their pre-Iran-war volume. Those two facts can be true at once: Ukrainian refinery strikes tighten middle distillates, and a closed East-West line tightens crude available to Asia and Europe.

The number that matters for the next week is not the intraday high of $109. It is whether Yanbu is still loading on day six and day seven. If it is, the market has used the tank farm as advertised. If it is not, the $120 path Sarkar sketched becomes the working case, and the Hormuz premium stops being a chart annotation and becomes the price of the barrel.