31JUL

Oil keeps its war premium near $78

2 min read

09:24UTC

Brent crude held near $78 on 9 July, barely off its 8 July spike, keeping the six per cent war premium in place ahead of a 17 July sanctions deadline.

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Key takeaway

Brent's held premium shows the market pricing an open-ended war, with a US sanctions cliff due 17 July.

Brent Crude traded at $78.17 to $78.21 on Thursday 9 July, barely below the $78.67 it reached on 8 July after the strike-and-retaliation spike . Brent is the benchmark that prices roughly two-thirds of the world's traded oil, so where it settles feeds straight into fuel costs and government revenues. The premium held through a second round of exchange rather than fading on relief. Earlier war spikes had drained away within a session or two; this one has not.

The next scheduled pressure point falls on 17 July, when the wind-down deadline on the revoked oil-sanctions waiver strips Iranian crude sales of US authorisation ¹. Traders are pricing an open-ended fight rather than a contained flare-up, holding the six per cent jump in place ahead of a deadline that could tighten Iranian supply further.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Brent crude is the main global price benchmark for oil, and it affects petrol and diesel prices worldwide. After the US and Iran traded strikes on 8 and 9 July, the price barely moved down from its spike, staying just above $78 a barrel. That matters because previous rounds of fighting this year saw prices spike and then fall back quickly. This time the price is staying high, partly because a US licence that currently allows some Iranian oil sales is due to expire completely on 17 July.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

Brent's refusal to fade after the strike-and-retaliation exchange reflects a structural shift in what the market is pricing.

The benchmark has absorbed months of recurring strikes without moving much; what is new is the compounding effect of a hard licence deadline landing eight days later, when General License X1's wind-down window closes entirely.

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources from Israel

Israel

The immediate move, Brent settling at $78.17-$78.21 on 9 July against Wednesday's $78.67 spike, is a one per cent pullback, far smaller than the swings seen after prior strikes this year, suggesting traders are holding a war-risk floor rather than unwinding it.

Structurally, the 17 July deadline on General License X1 removes the last US authorisation for Iranian crude purchases entirely, a harder cutoff than the waiver-revocation cycle Iran has absorbed before; London's P&I Clubs have already kept their Hormuz war-risk exclusion in force through the market's earlier recovery, meaning insurance costs will price the deadline days before it arrives, ahead of the spot market.

Consensus view: Energy Aspects' Amrita Sen assesses the failure of Brent to retreat below $78 after the 8-9 July exchange, unlike the fortnight in late June when the benchmark moved barely a dollar through repeated strikes , signals traders are now pricing the 17 July wind-down deadline on General License X1, not the strikes themselves.

Counter-view: CNPC's Economics and Technology Research Institute in Beijing argues Chinese buyers have already adjusted around prior sanctions cycles and expect the wind-down to simply shift more volume to dark-fleet cargoes rather than remove Iranian barrels from the market, meaning the $78 premium overstates the real supply risk.

Key tension: Whether the held premium reflects a genuine supply shock from the 17 July deadline or a market still catching up to how effectively sanctioned volumes have kept moving despite waiver revocations.

Sources:Windward

Mentions:Brent Crude →OFAC →General License X1 →Beijing →CNPC →Iran →Energy Aspects →General License X →

First Reported In

Update #150 · Second US strike wave, first heavy toll

Windward· 9 Jul 2026

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Causes and effects

Caused by

Hormuz goes dark as tankers flee

Brent's fall to $75.80 reverses the war premium held through the 9 July strike-and-retaliation round.

Occurred 8 Jul 2026

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This Event

Oil keeps its war premium near $78

Oil holding its war premium through a second exchange shows traders are pricing continuation, not a contained flare-up.

Led to

Second US strike wave in 48 hours

The held oil premium is a direct market response to the 8-9 July strike-and-retaliation exchange.

Occurred 8 Jul 2026

Read story →

Brent jumps 6% as oil ends its shrug

The 9 July price holds just below the six per cent spike recorded on 8 July.

Occurred 8 Jul 2026

Read story →

Hormuz risk lifts the Brent-Dubai EFS

Brent's held war premium into 9 July sustained the EFS widening.

Occurred 8 Jul 2026

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Different Perspectives

Shipping and insurance underwriters

Underwriters can price Houthi strikes because the group announces its targets, but an unclaimed drone at Damietta and a mandatory Iranian insurance scheme both deny them a pattern to price against. War-risk premiums are increasingly being set by the absence of a claimant, not the scale of the damage.

Jordan

Azraq absorbed its fourth Iranian strike in seven weeks, again drawing no direct Jordanian retaliation, only an American one. Amman's exposure, hosting US basing without the Patriot density of Gulf allies, has not changed even as the war around it widens.

Houthi movement

The Houthis' 20 July blockade of Saudi-linked shipping is the injury Riyadh's new 43-nation coalition directly answers, yet the group itself was never asked to join and remains outside every proposal on the table. Sanaa-aligned commentators call the coalition a paper reassurance for insurers rather than a deployable force.

Egypt's Cabinet

Egypt confirmed the Damietta blaze was an attack, not an accident, on soil the war had never touched before. Cairo now faces an unclaimed threat to a facility supplying roughly 7% of its domestic gas, with no author to hold accountable and no pattern yet to defend against.

Oman

Muscat is running the only channel Iran will use, a voluntary Hormuz fee modelled on Malacca, but stayed out of Saudi Arabia's new naval coalition entirely. Oman's mediating leverage depends on treating Hormuz as shared and non-exclusive, the opposite of what Tehran is now demanding of it.

Iraq's Prime Minister

Al-Zaidi cancelled his first official Riyadh visit and convened the Coordination Framework, the coalition that keeps him in power and whose factions sit inside the PMF that Saudi jets just struck. He is caught between a five-year Saudi investment relationship and armed groups inside his own state he does not fully control.