Oil futures spent much of the spring moving sideways while something very different was happening in the physical market.
Inventories were disappearing
Strategic reserves were being spent. Tankers that had been at sea when the Iran war began were arriving and emptying out. The buffers that had kept prices from spiking were being consumed, one by one.
ExxonMobil has been watching those buffers drain in real time, and its two most senior voices have now said publicly what that means for where prices are heading. What ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods said about the oil supply shock Speaking on ExxonMobil’s (XOM) first-quarter 2026 earnings call, CEO Darren Woods told Wall Street analysts that markets have not yet absorbed the full impact of the Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. “There was a lot of oil in transit on the water, a lot of inventory on the water that has been deployed in the first month of the conflict. Strategic petroleum reserves have been released, commercial inventories have been drawn down,” Woods said, according to CNBC.