The world is burning through its last lines of energy defence, and the man who runs the biggest oil company on the planet says the damage will not be undone quickly. In his first in-person speech since the US-Israeli war on Iran began, Saudi Aramco chief executive Amin Nasser warned on Monday that the squeeze on crude oil and refined fuels is set to tighten — and that refilling the emergency stockpiles drawn on over the past seven months could take up to two years.
Nasser told the Energy Intelligence Forum in London that almost 3 billion barrels of oil supply have been lost since the conflict started at the end of February, and roughly 1 billion barrels have been released from global stocks to fill the gap. Even when the Strait of Hormuz — the artery for a fifth of the world's oil trade — fully reopens, he said, rebuilding the reserves while meeting everyday demand would require the equivalent of an extra 2 million barrels per day for at least 18 months.
Table of Contents
- A 'scarily thin' cushion
- Why Hormuz still decides everything
- The G7's 100-million-barrel gamble
- What 'two years' really means
- Frequently Asked Questions
A 'scarily thin' cushion
The numbers Nasser put before the London audience were stark. When the war began, the world held roughly 10 billion barrels of oil in storage. That figure has fallen to less than 6 billion — and, critically, only about a tenth of what remains is actually usable. The rest is trapped in pipelines or needed to keep storage tanks operating at minimum levels, he explained, according to Reuters.
"The system is already straining," Nasser said — a verdict echoed by Bloomberg's coverage of the speech, which described the global oil supply buffer as "scarily thin." The implication is unsettling: the stockpiles that have cushioned consumers from the full force of the Hormuz disruption are largely an illusion, a paper reserve that cannot be drawn down in practice.
The pain, Nasser stressed, is not evenly distributed. "Until Hormuz fully re-opens and confidence returns, the crude reality is that pressure at both ends of the barrel will intensify," he said. "While the squeeze on crude is serious, refined fuel prices have risen even more sharply." Brent crude has hovered around $100 a barrel over the past month, while diesel and jet fuel — the products most exposed to refinery bottlenecks — have surged faster still, feeding the diesel crunch gripping transport and industry.
Why Hormuz still decides everything
Iran's effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz after the February attacks remains the hinge on which the entire crisis turns. Gulf producers have worked to route around the blockage — Saudi Arabia and its neighbours have pressed their own tankers into service, and flows have reportedly climbed back toward pre-war levels. But as The National reported, markets are still pricing in the security risk to supply across the Gulf and the Red Sea, keeping Brent pinned near triple digits despite the higher throughput.
Nasser argued that oil would already be trading at $200 a barrel were it not for Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline, which lets the kingdom bypass Hormuz and load crude on the Red Sea coast. The claim underscores how much of today's relative calm rests on a single piece of infrastructure — and on the assumption that the Houthi campaign against Saudi targets does not take it offline again.
The CEO also played down the idea that Saudi Arabia is holding back. The kingdom's maximum sustainable production capacity of 12 million barrels per day could be brought onstream within days, he said, and its own strategic reserves and system flexibility remain intact. The problem, in his telling, is not Saudi output but the plumbing of the global system: closed chokepoints, thin stocks and a market running on confidence that could evaporate with a single new escalation.
The G7's 100-million-barrel gamble
Nasser's warning landed just days after the world's richest economies announced their biggest collective market intervention in years. Under pressure from US President Donald Trump, who earlier threatened a ban on American diesel exports, the G7 agreed on Friday to release 100 million barrels of diesel and crude from emergency reserves and pledged not to restrict energy exports, as Gulf News reported.
Releasing stockpiles will buy economies some time, Nasser conceded — but it will not fix the underlying imbalance between supply and demand. That framing puts him at odds with the political messaging around the G7's coordinated release: Washington presents the 100-million-barrel move as a turning point; Aramco's chief reads it as a stopgap that could leave buffers even thinner if Hormuz stays closed.
The tension matters because the stockpiles being tapped are the same ones Nasser says could take two years to rebuild. Every barrel released now is a barrel that must be repurchased later — and if the drawdowns continue, the rebuilding timeline he sketched on Monday becomes harder, not easier.
What 'two years' really means
For consumers and businesses, the two-year horizon reframes the crisis from an emergency into an era. Consumption of crude is still rising, Nasser noted, and countries will need even more supply for at least the next two years simply to rebuild inventories — adding at least 2 million barrels a day to demand, or more if governments choose to hold larger buffers. Global daily demand is already running above 100 million barrels a day, so a 2% uplift is not trivial in a market with almost no slack.
For policymakers, the message is that the post-Hormuz world cannot be repaired by a single ceasefire headline. Markets will need the waterway fully reopened, security guarantees that convince shippers to return, and then a long, expensive grind of buying back the oil that was spent keeping economies running through 2026. "Even then," Nasser said, the refilling could take up to two years — a timetable that stretches well past the American midterms and into the next phase of a war that shows no sign of a political settlement.
The irony is hard to miss: the cheapest oil policy would be peace, and the most expensive commodity of all is turning out to be time.
Frequently Asked Questions
What did the Aramco CEO actually say about oil stockpiles?
Amin Nasser told the Energy Intelligence Forum in London on 5 October that refilling global oil stockpiles depleted during the Hormuz crisis could take up to two years, that nearly 3 billion barrels of supply have been lost since the war on Iran began, and that most remaining stored oil is not practically available to the market.
Why are oil prices still near $100 a barrel?
Iran's effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz has choked one of the world's most important shipping routes, and markets are still pricing in security risks across the Gulf and the Red Sea. Emergency stock releases by the G7 have bought time but have not restored confidence, so Brent crude has stayed near triple digits for about a month.
Will the G7's 100-million-barrel release solve the crisis?
According to Nasser, no. He said releasing stockpiles will buy economies some time but will not fix the imbalance between supply and demand — and it will leave the buffers that much thinner if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed.
What is Saudi Arabia doing about the disruption?
Nasser said the kingdom's maximum sustainable output of 12 million barrels per day could be made available within days, and that Saudi Arabia's strategic reserves and system flexibility remain intact. The kingdom has also kept crude flowing through its East-West pipeline to the Red Sea, bypassing Hormuz.
