As oil and gas prices continue to soar amid disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz, President Donald Trump’s recent announcement of a U.S. Navy blockade is expected to drive prices even higher, one energy expert warned on Sunday.
The Strait of Hormuz – a critical shipping channel through which 20% of the world’s oil trade flows – has remained inaccessible to U.S.-aligned vessels since late February after Trump authorized Operation Epic Fury. Re-opening the strait to U.S.-aligned vessels – as it was before the United States attacked Iran – has since emerged as the Trump administration’s new “paramount objective” of the war.
After negotiations between Washington and Tehran failed to produce results on Saturday, Trump took to social media early Sunday morning to reveal that he had directed the U.S. Navy to block all sea traffic to and from the Strait of Hormuz. Such a blockade, however, is likely only to exacerbate energy costs, warned Karen Young, a senior scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.
“If we have a blockade, we still have the problem of a shortage in the market of about 7 million barrels of crude, 4 million barrels of product not getting out,” Young told CNN. “And we just added to that by making the Iranian barrels off the market.”
Earlier on Sunday, Trump told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo that since he launched the U.S. war against Iran, gas prices hadn’t “gone up as much as I thought.” His comment came just two days after the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a report revealing gas prices had increased by 21% between February and March, which CNN’s Matt Egan noted was the largest month-over-month increase “since they started tracking this back in 1967.”
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