By Seher Dareen <\/p>\n
LONDON, July 24 (Reuters) – Oil futures prices fell over 3% on Friday but are still set for hefty weekly gains because of concerns about disrupted energy flows in the \u200cRed Sea and fears of further escalation in the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. <\/p>\n
Brent futures fell nearly $4, or \u200c3.96%, to $96.70 a barrel at 0946 GMT, having settled above $100 in the previous session for the first time since May after Iran-aligned \u200bHouthis said they struck two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea. <\/p>\n
The contract remained on course for a 9.7% advance this week. <\/p>\n
West Texas Intermediate (WTI) futures were down $3.15 or 3.42% at $89.04 a barrel, on track for a nearly 8% weekly rise. <\/p>\n
“Major hubs of oil production or supply routes are surrounded by war… The short-term outlook is bullish,” said PVM Oil \u200cAssociates analyst John Evans. <\/p>\n
U.S. President Donald \u2060Trump promised “major military punishment” for Iran and its Houthi allies after the strikes in the Red Sea. <\/p>\n
Iran had been pressing the Houthis to close the Bab el-Mandeb gateway to \u2060the Red Sea if the U.S. continued to attack Iranian power infrastructure. It is the second most important route for energy shipments after the Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Gulf. <\/p>\n
Additionally, the Houthis had declared on Monday that they \u200bwere imposing \u200ba naval blockade on Saudi Arabia, which had been diverting \u200bits oil via pipeline to get around \u200cIran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz. <\/p>\n
Daily vessel transits through the Strait of Hormuz were steady at three for each of the past three days, preliminary ship-tracking data from Kpler showed. Another two ships \u2014 including empty very large crude carrier Noble \u2014 also entered the Gulf via the strait on Thursday. <\/p>\n
Meanwhile, at the Bab el-Mandeb strait, commodity vessel transits totalled 32 on July 23, up from 26 the day before, Kpler data showed, with two crossings \u200cfor July 24 so far. <\/p>\n
“In the right seas, ships are still \u200bmoving… so it’s not a complete blockade as some might have \u200bfeared,” said Giovanni Staunovo, a UBS analyst. <\/p>\n
Analysts at \u200bJPMorgan said in a note that each additional month of disruption to oil supply \u200cwould add around $7 to $8 a barrel to Brent, \u200blifting monthly average prices to \u200baround $114 a barrel if disruptions extend to three months. <\/p>\n
Elsewhere, Russia said on Friday that its forces had struck three Ukrainian ports overnight targeting infrastructure \u2014 including loading and unloading facilities and fuel reserves \u2014 which supported \u200bKyiv’s armed forces. <\/p>\n
On Thursday, Kazakhstan’s energy \u200cministry said oil companies temporarily reduced production after suspected Ukrainian drone attacks forced the country’s main \u200bBlack Sea export terminal to close. <\/p>\n
(Reporting by Colleen Howe in Beijing and Siyi Liu in Singapore; \u200bEditing by Thomas Derpinghaus, Tomasz Janowski and Emelia Sithole-Matarise) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Seher Dareen LONDON, July 24 (Reuters) – Oil futures prices fell over 3% on Friday but are…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":557315,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[247566,42,87,43,125313,38372,114994,40,38,41,39,108917],"class_list":["post-557314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-bab-el-mandeb","tag-headlines","tag-iran","tag-news","tag-oil-futures","tag-oil-production","tag-strait-of-hormuz","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-west-texas-intermediate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=557314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557314\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/557315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=557314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=557314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=557314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}