Oil prices rose Thursday as analysts cautioned that a potential U.S. military strike against Iran could lead to major supply disruptions and fuel uncertainty in the Middle East.
The price for a barrel of global Brent benchmark crude settled at more than $71 a barrel Thursday — up about 2 percent from a day earlier and several dollars higher than earlier in the week.
Oil executives around the world will keep a close eye on geopolitical developments in the coming days. While the industry has been battered by low crude prices over the past year, a new Middle East conflict could unleash a period of uncertainty even as it would boost oil prices if supplies are limited in some regions.
“I think as Iran becomes more and more chaotic or less and less stable, the probability that that chaos extends outside the country into the [Middle East] region increases,” Skip York, an energy and global oil fellow with Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, said in an interview Thursday.
