Brent has fallen back below $101 while the tanker attack tempo in Hormuz keeps climbing

The Energy Information Administration’s Short-Term Energy Outlook, released on 6 October with a forecast completed on 1 October, reports that Brent spot averaged $114 a barrel in September, $23 higher than August. The agency attributes the rise to attacks on oil infrastructure and tankers, “most notably” strikes on Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline, the main route used to bypass Hormuz, which temporarily halted flows. The EIA now forecasts Brent averaging $105 in the fourth quarter, $14 above its previous outlook. The market has moved the other way since. Trading Economics recorded Brent at $100.84 on 6 October, up 0.51 percent on the day and 54.06 percent year on year, with WTI at $87.99, down 1.61 percent. Those are contract-for-difference quotes rather than settlements, and the divergence between the two benchmarks on a single day is unusually wide; the EIA figures are the load-bearing ones.

The violence has not eased to match. UK Maritime Trade Operations logged five separate incidents in the strait on 6 October, four of them tanker attacks, according to gCaptain and Yahoo reporting. On 5 October the agency issued four warnings and one advisory inside four hours: an LPG tanker struck by an unknown projectile at 1716, a crude oil tanker at 1907, and a 3 October strike on a crude carrier above the waterline. One incident occurred eleven nautical miles north of Oman; the commercial security firm Vanguard Tech identified the vessel as the Liberia-registered Singapore Energy, an identification UKMTO itself does not make. On 6 October UKMTO reported a tanker turning back after Iranian forces threatened to target it: “The master of the tanker has confirmed that they have complied with the instruction.” The Kuwaiti-flagged VLCC MT Kazimah III caught fire after being struck on 1 October; five crew were rescued.

How many ships have been hit is genuinely contested. Windward counts eight merchant vessels struck since 28 September. The New York Times, reaching us through aggregation, reported at least eleven tankers attacked over the same period, four of them in two days. gCaptain’s tally was at least six since 27 September, flagged by the aggregator carrying it as not independently confirmed. No neutral authority publishes a running count. Windward’s operational data for 4 October is more precise and less quoted: thirteen transits, five inbound and eight outbound, eleven of them using the northern corridor and one crossing dark — and jammed vessels running 103 percent above the seven-day average, generating 841 false ship-to-ship meetings in a single day.

Assessment: The price is telling you what the market believes about volume, not about risk. Flows at 81 percent of pre-war, by Kpler’s estimate, plus unchanged OPEC+ November quotas, are enough to drain the September premium even while individual hulls burn — shipowners absorb the risk through insurance and routing, and the barrels still arrive. That holds until something interrupts volume rather than vessels, which is what the East-West pipeline strike did and what the EIA explicitly prices. The number to watch is not the attack count, which nobody is counting consistently, but the jamming figure: 841 phantom rendezvous in a day is a navigation environment degrading faster than the casualty tallies suggest.