The International Energy Agency (IEA) has issued an unprecedented alert: the armed conflict in Iran has caused the disruption of the global oil market—the most serious disruption ever documented by the agency since its creation in 1974. A statement that resonates like an earthquake in trading rooms and energy ministries around the world.
Iran occupies a strategic position among the world’s major hydrocarbon producers. A member of OPEC, the country exported, before hostilities began, between 3 and 4 million barrels per day, a volume that alone represents several percentage points of the world oil supply.
The sudden disruption of these flows, combined with tensions in the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint for about 20% of global oil, created a supply shock of a magnitude that economic models had not anticipated at this scale.
The IEA explicitly speaks of an “unprecedented disruption in its monitoring history,” surpassing the oil shocks of 1973, the 1990-1991 Gulf War, or the 2011 Libyan crisis. The severity of the term used by such a cautious institution in its formulations says everything about the systemic nature of the event.
On global stock markets, the reaction was immediate and violent. The price of Brent crude, the international benchmark, recorded double-digit gains within a few sessions, surpassing levels unseen for several years. U.S. WTI followed the same trajectory, pulling along the entire energy chain: natural gas, kerosene, and home heating oil.
For economies heavily dependent on oil imports—Europe, Japan, South Korea, India—the energy bill is rising at a pace that rekindles fears of an inflationary spiral difficult for central banks to control. The European Union, which had already suffered the gas crisis in 2022, finds itself once again at the front line of a structural vulnerability that it was struggling to fix.
In light of the magnitude of the shock, the IEA urgently convened its member states and activated the collective release mechanism of strategic petroleum reserves—a procedure used only three times in the history of the organization: in 1991, in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina, and in 2022 following the invasion of Ukraine. This fourth activation underscores the exceptional nature of the situation.
The IEA members theoretically hold the equivalent of 90 days of net imports in emergency stocks. The release of a portion of these reserves aims to compensate in the short term for the disappearance of Iranian barrels from the market and to send a signal of calm to traders. But analysts are unanimous: these stocks have a limited buffering capacity over time, and without a rapid diplomatic or military resolution of the conflict, price pressure will again become structural.
