Oil & Gas Corner

Tuesday, 2026-09-22 · covering the last 24h

Market signal

Crude falls for a fifth straight session as the Saudi pipeline comes back and Washington and Tehran talk for three hours. Brent fell more than $2/bbl intraday to its lowest since September 8 and settled down about 1% near $99.25, while WTI shed roughly 1.2% to settle near $94.59, after Trump told reporters US and Iranian delegations met on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly and Saudi Arabia began restarting its East-West pipeline. CNBC

US diesel sets another fresh record, $6.51 a gallon. AAA's national average extended Saturday's $6.505 print as refiners keep running flat-out with no spare distillate capacity to add, even as the crude complex eased. AAA · WRDW (AP)

Upstream — exploration & production

Trump threatens to "annihilate" Iran at the UN, then his team holds three hours of talks with Tehran's delegation the same day. In his General Assembly address Trump said he faces a choice between a deal and annihilating the Islamic Republic, predicted no agreement before the US midterms, then told reporters afterward that US and Iranian officials had met for three hours and called it "a very good meeting"; Iran's joint military command dismissed the annihilation threat as "domestic propaganda" and warned it remains ready to "inflict even more severe, crushing, and unpredictable blows." Axios · AP via Local10

Midstream — pipelines, LNG & shipping

Saudi Arabia restarts the East-West pipeline and moves to reopen Yanbu exports. The pipeline, which had been rerouting roughly 4 million b/d — about 4% of global supply — around the Strait of Hormuz since a September 13 drone attack forced its shutdown, is pumping again at a low rate, with one cargo scheduled to load at Yanbu on Tuesday bound for China; the news was the immediate trigger for Tuesday's sharper leg down in Brent. Reuters via Investing.com · U.S. News (Reuters)

Downstream — refining, fuels & chemicals

Ukraine's largest-ever drone strike on Moscow knocks out Gazprom Neft's Moscow refinery. The overnight September 19-20 attack set fire to both primary crude units — the AVT-6 distillation unit and the integrated processing unit, plus the isomerization unit — halting all crude processing at the 240,000+ b/d plant and killing three people; the refinery's output has since been pulled from the St. Petersburg exchange, with repairs expected to take several weeks and no restart timeline given. This adds to Yaroslavl, Ryazan, Saratov and Syzran among the Russian refineries hit this month. Kyiv Post · Bloomberg (paywall)

ExxonMobil's Joliet refinery finally begins restarting, more than a week after its flood-related shutdown. Wood Mackenzie says key units at the 275,000 b/d Illinois plant are now in restart with flaring underway, though Exxon has still given no public timeline or damage estimate for the outage that has helped keep Midwest diesel at records. Reuters via TradingView

The Chatter

Doomberg (newsletter): in "Escalation Clauses," Doomberg argues the market is underpricing the cumulative effect of Ukraine's refinery campaign — Moscow joining Yaroslavl, Ryazan, Saratov, Syzran and Bashneft-Ufaneftekhim on the target list within weeks — in a world that was already chronically short of diesel before a single one of these strikes landed. Post (paywall)

HFI Research (Substack): in "(WCTW) The Final Countdown," HFI flags Chinese state majors buying crude "as if it's going out of stock" just ahead of Thursday's Xi-Trump summit, alongside Gulf of Oman outflows climbing toward 15 million b/d in Kpler's first-week-of-September data — a pattern HFI says raises more questions than it answers about what Beijing is positioning for. Post (paywall)

Alex Longley, Bloomberg (newsletter): in "Record Oil Supertanker Rates Make Waves for the Whole Fleet," Longley argues the story has moved beyond the headline VLCC rate — record supertanker earnings are now dragging up day rates across smaller tanker classes too, a fleet-wide contagion he says has no real precedent. Post (paywall)