The oil price crunch is looming

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The writer is an adjunct senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy, Columbia University, and on the advisory board of Crystol Energy

The world is watching a race between two blockades. Washington blocks Iran’s oil income while Tehran threatens the world’s oil artery. Both disrupt energy flows to inflict economic damage and seek to force political concessions. 

For Iran, the prospect that a naval blockade will force its government into serious negotiations is dim. Technically, the government still has control over its oil and gas production, including the ability to scale it up or down. Even if the blockade cuts into revenues and damages production capacity in the long term, why would economic misery sway a regime with a long record of prioritising dogma over wellbeing, and with its back to the wall? At a minimum, that will take time.

For the rest of the world, time is running out. In volume terms, the de facto blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran is the largest disruption in the history of global oil markets. Many observers wonder why markets appear surprisingly unfazed: oil prices are up but not as much as after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Stock markets, in particular, are strong.

The lack of market panic is not irrational. Inventories and expectations tell the story: oil markets were well supplied when the attacks on Iran started, with supply exceeding consumption and inventories high. Financial markets signal expectations that the war and disruption will stop before inventories show the strain. While the spot price for oil has escalated, futures prices for delivery a few months from now are lower and falling. But what if the two blockades continue?

One argument often marshalled to explain why markets are sanguine is that oil is no longer as important as it used to be. Global oil intensity — the amount of oil necessary to produce a certain amount of economic output — has improved dramatically over the decades. In 1973, the year of the first oil price shock, I calculate from industry sources that about 80 per cent of one barrel of oil was consumed per $1,000 of global GDP in 2025 prices — 131 litres, to be precise. In 1980, the year after the Iranian revolution, this was down to 116 litres. Last year, it was 52 litres.

The current level is still a lot, but the average oil burden is 60 per cent less than 50 years ago. If so much less oil is needed, real prices should have much more room to escalate before they cause the economic damage associated with previous disruptions.

A simple illustration of today’s diminished oil cost burden to the global economy is to adjust the nominal price of oil not only for inflation but also for the efficiency improvements. If one does, a hypothetical price of $115 per barrel today compares with an average price of $339 in 1980 in today’s dollars. By this measure, prices have plenty of runway before the oil burden resembles 1980.

Unfortunately, the improvements in oil intensity are a double-edged sword. Oil consumption today is more concentrated in high-value uses and in areas where there is no substitute, like road or air freight and maritime shipping. These are load-bearing economic activities, less price sensitive than discretionary or consumption-oriented drivers of growth. Once disrupted they are likely to cascade through the economy.

Traditionally, oil price increases translate into an economic recession via inflation and tighter monetary policies; or by affecting growth directly, through diminished purchasing power or by triggering fiscal and balance of payments constraints. It is mostly the average cost of oil that matters to these channels.

Today, price increases will hit the high-value use of oil which cannot be substituted. The cost then is the loss of economic activity and value creation, caused by shutting down a particular node. Oil concentrated in high-value uses is a little bit like rare earths, tiny compared with the size of GDP but essential for much of it. If the size of a supply disruption requires demand to come down and prices surge to the required level, the response will be sudden with a potentially unforeseen and disproportionate impact on economic activity.

Modern, wealthy and service-based economies do not have an escape hatch. With transport disruptions, their supply chains become vulnerable and disruptions unpredictable. The longer the two blockades continue, the more likely a crisis-like adjustment in the world’s leading economies, rather than the slow-growth recession we have been used to.

A theocracy like Iran can suppress economic pain. In a democracy, deliberately gambling away economic stability eventually means paying a political price.