For most of the 2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis, the only forecasting question that mattered was how high oil would go and how long the strait would stay closed. That question has now flipped. With a US-Iran framework signed in June and tanker traffic resuming through the strait, the debate has inverted: not how high, but how far down, and how fast.
Brent crude, which crossed $112 a barrel at the April 2026 peak, fell back below $80 once the deal was signed. WTI dropped below $75. The war premium that defined the market for four months is gone. What replaces it is a slower, more familiar argument about supply and demand, and the major forecasters disagree about how it resolves. Understanding why the ranges are wide is as useful as knowing the numbers.
The Question Has Inverted
During the crisis, the bullish case was simple: a chokepoint carrying a fifth of the world's seaborne oil was constrained, and no combination of reserves and pipelines could replace the lost volume. That case is unwinding. The bearish case now has three legs.
The first is the return of withheld supply. The barrels that were trapped behind the blockade do not vanish. As the strait clears, they come back to a market that has already repriced lower. The second is OPEC+ spare capacity. Producers who held output back, or who pumped at elevated prices during the crisis, now face a market with no premium and softening demand. The third is demand itself. The IEA cut its 2026 demand growth forecast during the crisis, citing the economic drag of a year of high energy prices. Weaker demand meeting returning supply is the classic setup for a glut.
The bullish case has not disappeared. It has narrowed to a single point: the deal is an interim framework, not a final settlement, and it can still fail.
What the Major Forecasters Are Saying
World Bank had projected in its April 2026 Commodity Markets Outlook that energy prices would rise sharply for the year, with a crisis-driven upside scenario putting Brent above $115. With the crisis resolving, attention shifts to its longer-run view, which has consistently pointed to a well-supplied market and softer prices into 2027 as non-OPEC supply grows.
IEA (International Energy Agency) cut its 2026 oil demand forecast by roughly 700,000 barrels a day during the crisis and has flagged the risk of a supply surplus building into 2027, with supply growth running well ahead of demand growth. Its supply-demand balances now point toward loosening, not tightening, as Gulf flows normalize.
Goldman Sachs had modeled a sustained Hormuz closure pushing Brent above $150. With the strait reopening, that scenario is off the table for now, and the bank's framework shifts to the speed of supply normalization and the size of the OPEC+ surplus, both of which point lower over the back half of 2026.
EIA (US Energy Information Administration) publishes monthly Short-Term Energy Outlooks. Its pre-crisis 2026 baseline had Brent in the mid-$70s. As the disruption unwinds, its forecasts move back toward that kind of fundamentally-driven range, with the caveat that the path depends on how cleanly the deal holds.
The common thread: every major forecaster now sees the balance of risk tilted toward lower prices, with the main upside risk being a failure of the fragile diplomatic settlement.
Why the Ranges Are So Wide
Oil price forecasting is difficult even in calm markets. Professional forecasters, futures markets, and the agencies closest to the data routinely miss by $20 to $30 a barrel over a 12-month horizon. The post-crisis environment keeps the ranges wide for three reasons.
The key variable is still political. The framework signed in June opens a 60-day window to negotiate the hard questions: the nuclear program, the sequencing of sanctions relief, the permanent status of the strait and whether Iran charges tolls. Whether that negotiation succeeds is not an economic variable with a known range. It is a political one, and the strait could re-close if it breaks down.
The pace of supply return is genuinely uncertain. A signed deal does not move a tanker. Mines have to be cleared, insurers have to lower war-risk premiums, and trapped vessels have to sail. Estimates for full normalization run from weeks to months. How fast the withheld barrels actually arrive determines whether prices grind lower or fall sharply.
The size of the surplus is hard to estimate. How much OPEC+ output was held back, how much other producers added during the crisis, and how soft demand has become after a year of high prices all feed into whether the market clears in the $70s, the $60s, or lower. Those numbers are not yet known.
The Scenario Framework
Rather than a single forecast, most serious analysts are working with scenarios. After the deal, the scenarios have inverted from the crisis-era versions.
Smooth reopening (Brent $60s to low $70s by end-2026). The framework holds, the strait clears over the summer, and withheld OPEC+ supply returns into soft demand. The risk premium is already gone, so the move lower comes from fundamentals: too many barrels chasing weak demand. This scenario includes the possibility of an overshoot, where prices fall below the level justified by long-run fundamentals before settling. The forward curve, with its back end well below current spot, is roughly pricing this as a meaningful probability.
Bumpy reopening (Brent $75 to $90). The deal holds but implementation drags. Mine-clearing takes longer than the 30 days the framework allows, insurance stays expensive, and the 60-day talks grind without a clean final agreement. Supply returns gradually rather than in a wave. Prices stabilize in a band, neither collapsing nor spiking, while the market waits for clarity.
Deal collapse (Brent $110 to $150+). The 60-day negotiation fails, the Lebanon front reignites and drags Iran back out of the framework, or a new incident re-closes the strait. A market now carrying zero war premium would snap violently higher, faster than it fell, because the premium would have to be rebuilt from nothing. This is the lower-probability, high-impact tail, and it is the main reason prices have not fallen further already.
What the Forward Curve Says
The oil futures market is one forecasting tool with money behind it. After the deal, the Brent curve shifted from steep backwardation, where near-month prices sat far above later months, toward a flatter and in places contango structure, where later months trade at or above the front. That shift reflects a market that no longer sees acute near-term scarcity and is pricing the return of supply.
It is not a point forecast. A given level on the late-2027 curve is consistent with many paths: a smooth glide lower, a bumpy range, or a volatile path that averages out. The curve reflects the cost of hedging across those scenarios, not a consensus prediction. What it does tell you is direction, and after the signing the direction of the curve moved decisively away from crisis pricing.
What Would Move Prices The Other Way
The near-term upside risks are political, not economic. A breakdown in the 60-day talks, a re-closure of the strait, or a Lebanon escalation that pulls Iran out of the framework would each rebuild a premium the market has fully discarded. Because that premium is now zero, the move on any of those headlines would be sharp.
Over a longer horizon, the picture is more bearish. Non-OPEC supply growth from US shale, Brazil's deepwater fields, and other producers continues to add barrels. Demand growth is being compressed by the economic aftermath of the crisis and by efficiency gains. Both factors work toward lower prices over a multi-year horizon, which is why the back of the curve sits well below the crisis peak.
Why Forecasts Are Useful Despite Being Wrong
The point of an oil price forecast is not to predict the number. It is to understand which variables matter most and in what direction they push prices. The crisis made the key variable obvious: Hormuz throughput. The aftermath makes it almost as clear, just inverted. The questions now are how fast the strait fully reopens, how large the returning surplus turns out to be, and whether the interim deal survives its 60-day window.
Watching the forecast ranges narrow or widen, and understanding why they move, tells you more about the market than the midpoint number does. For most of 2026 the risk was to the upside. For the rest of it, unless the deal breaks, the risk is to the downside.
This article reflects analyst forecasts and market data current as of June 2026. Oil price forecasts are subject to significant uncertainty. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice.