LONDON, July 9 — The mechanics here are brutally simple, and they have not changed in over half a century. A geopolitical rupture in a key producing region, a sudden drop in supply, a scramble for cargoes, and prices lurch upward. The 5.8% jump in crude prices on February 4, 2025, is the latest tremor in this long pattern, and analysts at the International Energy Agency are watching the Strait of Hormuz with a wary eye.
The history is a catalogue of shocks, each one a lesson in how fragile the global oil market really is. The 1973 oil crisis is the template.
After OPEC’s Arab members imposed an embargo targeting the United States and its allies for supporting Israel, the price of a barrel quadrupled, from $3 to $12. That was the moment the industrialised world realised it had built its postwar prosperity on a raw material that could be weaponised. The U.S. response was the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, established in 1975 as a direct consequence of that crisis.
The catch is that reserves are a buffer, not a cure. At its peak in 2010, the SPR held 727 million barrels — a formidable stockpile, but one that can only buy time, not solve the underlying vulnerability.
Follow the money through the subsequent crises, and the pattern repeats. The 1979 Iranian Revolution sent prices from $13 to $39 per barrel, a 150% increase, as Iranian output collapsed from 6 million barrels per day to just 1.5 million. The 1990 Gulf War, triggered by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, doubled prices from $16 to $32 within three months.
In each case, the mechanism was the same: a supply disruption from a key producer, panic buying by refiners and traders, and governments turning to their strategic reserves to cool the market. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine pushed Brent crude above $130 per barrel. That spike was driven by the prospect of sanctions cutting off one of the world’s largest oil exporters, and by the market’s reflexive fear of the unknown.
The 2019 attack on Saudi Aramco’s Abqaiq and Khurais facilities offers a more recent, and more surgical, example of the same logic. The strikes temporarily cut 5.7 million barrels per day from global supply, causing a 15% price spike.
The attack was a reminder that even the most heavily defended infrastructure is vulnerable, and that a single drone can rattle a market worth trillions. The current 5.8% jump on February 4 is modest compared to these historical shocks. But the IEA’s analysts are not complacent.
The Strait of Hormuz risk amplifies potential impacts in a way that previous crises did not. A disruption there — whether from a military confrontation, a mine, or a deliberate act of sabotage — would take far more oil off the market than any single production outage ever has.
The lesson of 1973, and of every crisis since, is that the oil market does not forgive complacency. The infrastructure is stretched, the spare capacity is thin, and the geopolitical landscape is as volatile as it has been in decades. The 5.8% jump is a signal, not a catastrophe.
But signals, if ignored, become shocks.
