Oil could hit $100 if volumes from this key passageway don't ramp soon, says Goldman Sachs

By Nora Redmond

Oil at $100 could be reached if there's five weeks of disruption from Strait of Hormuz

A motorboat cruises along the shore off the town of Al Jeer on the Strait of Hormuz in the northern emirate of Ras Al Khaimah, with a tanker seen in the background, on February 25, 2026. Goldman Sachs raised its oil price forecast on Wednesday.

Oil prices surged to their highest level in more than a year as concerns grow about how the escalating conflict in Iran will disrupt worldwide supply chains.

The question now is how much further prices have to climb.

On Wednesday, analysts at Goldman Sachs led by Daan Struyven, co-head of global commodities research, say that if volumes of oil from the Strait of Hormuz remain flat for five more weeks, Brent crude (BRN00), the international benchmark, would likely extend to $100 a barrel.

The Brent futures contract was trading at $84.38, up 3.5%, after Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps claimed "complete control" of one of the world's most important maritime shipping routes.

The strategists wrote that oil at $100 would prevent inventories from declining to "critically low levels," which is defined as about 2.6 million barrels, the lowest point commercial oil stocks reached during 2022.

"Price increases may be even more non-linear in the length of the disruption than our estimates suggest because longer disruptions may increase the time required between the restart and full ramp-up of production," they said.

Goldman Sachs raised its forecast for the average price of Brent by $10 to $76 and by $9 to $71 for West Texas Intermediate (WTI) for the second quarter of this year, citing "substantial March Hormuz disruptions" resulting in an estimate of around 200,000 barrels of Middle Eastern crude production losses.

The West Texas Intermediate contracts was trading at $76.76 a barrel, a rise of 2.9%.

The price upgrade prediction is also based on the assumption of lingering geopolitical uncertainty regarding Iran and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

It comes after JPMorgan said Brent crude prices could reach as high as $120 a barrel on Monday, before a drone struck Saudi Arabia's Ras Tanura refinery. That refinery was struck again on Wednesday.

"We estimate that if the conflict lasts more than three weeks, [Gulf] oil producers would exhaust storage capacity and would be forced to shut in production. Under this scenario, Brent could trade in the $100-$120 range. Given the timeline of these unknowns, we are not making changes to our existing price forecast at this stage," strategists at JPMorgan led by Natasha Kaneva, head of global commodities research, wrote in a note.

-Nora Redmond

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03-04-26 0459ET