Morning Brief: Oil Teeters at $100 as Trump’s Iran Exit Pledge Clashes With a Deepening Supply Crisis

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Brent front-month futures last closed at $101.21 and WTI at $98.31 per Yahoo Finance as of 01 April 2026 12:13 UTC, both clawing back from an intraday plunge that briefly took Brent below $100 and WTI to $97.30 after President Trump stated US forces would leave Iran "within two to three weeks" and could declare victory without a formal deal. The announcement triggered an early-session sell-off exceeding 4% across both benchmarks per OilPrice.com as of 01 April 08:09 UTC, before prices partially recovered; by mid-morning Brent was last quoted around $102.98 and US crude at $100.31 per Audacy as of 01 April 10:03 UTC. Global equity markets surged sharply on the de-escalation signal, with the Nikkei 225 up 5.2% and Kospi up 8.4% per BBC as of 01 April 08:49 UTC.

The relief rally is colliding head-on with a rapidly deteriorating supply picture. The IEA head warned that April will see oil supply losses double compared to March — reaching approximately 12 million barrels per day — because tankers that transited before the war are now arriving while no new supply enters the market in April, a crisis exceeding all three previous major oil disruptions combined per CNBC as of 01 April 11:31 UTC. Separately, OPEC exports fell to their lowest level since June 2020 at 21.57 million bpd in March — down 7.3 million bpd month-on-month — with Iraq's production collapsing from 4.15 million bpd to just 1.4 million bpd in a single month per Kyiv Post as of 01 April 11:29 UTC. An Iranian missile strike on a QatarEnergy fuel oil tanker was also reported this morning per BBC as of 01 April 08:49 UTC, underscoring that kinetic activity in the Strait of Hormuz continues even as Trump signals an exit.

White House officials are now internally discussing the possibility of oil prices climbing to $150 or more per barrel, with the Treasury Department viewing prices above $100 as a likely persistent baseline and scenarios as high as $200 per barrel not being ruled out per E&E News by POLITICO as of 01 April 10:38 UTC. Coordinated government interventions — including a 400 million barrel emergency reserve release by 32 IEA nations, US Strategic Petroleum Reserve taps, sanctions waivers on Russian and Iranian crude, and Jones Act exemptions — are delivering only 1–2 million barrels per day of incremental relief, assessed as wholly insufficient to replace the approximately 20 million barrels per day of stranded output per WTOP as of 01 April 10:05 UTC. Iran's Foreign Affairs Minister has stated that no actual negotiations with the US are occurring, casting serious doubt on the credibility of Trump's two-to-three-week timeline per Al Jazeera as of 01 April 00:18 UTC.