What to expect from oil prices

More on what’s next on free energy. Let’s bring in Paul Sankey, founder and lead analyst at Sankey Research, joins us here at Post 9. Paul, welcome back. Good to have you. Are you a buyer of this idea that the market was kind of primed for the weekend at least? Well, yeah. I mean, Iran gave a lot of notice, right? And in fact, we’re on a run of U.S. intelligence, UK intelligence, getting things right. You know, after they warned us about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they said this was coming. It came and it was kind of pathetic, ultimately. Thankfully so I think the big thing behind all of this is is Iran’s supply of oil to China. You know, I think that the, the oil going east is what’s key and the posturing against Israel, you know the the the need to do something, having having had their own attack in Syria, it really means they have to posture. But the the, the likelihood of a national impact on the oil market remains thankfully pretty muted. This is we talked with Halima Croft about this this morning. Is the answer then going to come in the form of some kind of sanctions architecture as she put it? Yeah, I mean it’s it’s happened before, it’ll happen again. I mean I’m always amazed they can keep rank ramping up sanctions and like I thought we put sanctions in 10 years ago. And the same applies in Russia where you know you’ve you’ve got some movement in the metal stocks today based on the fact that Russian, Russian metals exports are going to be affected. But yeah, I think ultimately there’s going to be some sort of Israeli response, in fact breaking news as the Israel have said, they will respond and actually will be supported by the US in doing that. But the language here, as you know, has been very conciliatory from people, not so much conciliatory but at least calm from people like Russia, from people like Iraq. You know, some of the players in the region that could get very excited about all this are basically saying calm down, Let’s not have a major conflagration, please don’t the odds or probabilities of a some sort of restriction or disruption with Iranian oil supply go up after this weekend. I’m just confused about why, why, why everyone’s saying now that it’s not a big deal for oil? Well, I think the thing about it is I’m mentioning Iran, selling to China is Iran is most dependent of all things on its oil exports. And so they can’t risk any interruption to oil exports without, you know, really cutting off their nose to spite their face. So I think that Iran is sort of trapped here as to what it can really do. I don’t know why these guys don’t just settle down and try and make peace, quite frankly. I mean, you know, why they’re causing so much trouble when it’s not in their interests when they can supply oil to to China quite successfully and ultimately they’re just causing trouble, you know, but from an oil market point of view, it’s not in their interest to interrupt oil supply. And so they don’t. Now if they perceive that to be the potential, for example, to change the outcome of the US election, you know, maybe very high prices will cause the Biden administration some panic, you know that that might be part of their tactical thinking. But there’s no, you don’t think they’re willing to risk their oil production and oil shipments to go to war with Israel, correct. I mean, they can’t. They don’t have the money. And you can see from their military performance, they’re not exactly loaded as it is. In fact, they’re very stretched by all this proxy war that they fight. So, you know, and and they’re not popular domestically. It’s not like the American people support these guys. So, you know, I don’t know why they’re bothering, really. They’re on a losing wicket and they have been for 20 years. Yeah, we were watching the lines of the gas stations internally and some of the disruption there. But the same argument’s been made about Russia that Putin would love to disrupt supply to the extent where he could cause Biden some pain in November. Yeah, I think Russia’s a bit different different insofar as they they clearly would want higher prices. The issue for for Iran is to get the volumes to market because they are under sanctions. So that’s where it becomes complicated and why, you know, you tend to get a blind eye turn towards their supply to China. China also very interesting by the way in the Guyanese situation, you know, we’ve seen it being a partner there. It’s interesting how, you know, the Venezuelan threats against Guyana go nowhere. The Iranian threats just Peter out. And I think a big part of that is China standing behind the curtain going, you know, can you please not interrupt our oil supply? We don’t need a problem right here because we ourselves have our own issues and oil. We don’t want to be one of them.