Iran and Oman plan for temporary Hormuz corridor as impasse with US persists CAIRO ― Iran has held new talks with neighboring Oman on management of the Strait of Hormuz, blockaded over nearly six months of conflict, with Oman's foreign minister saying he was hopeful a temporary corridor through the waterway could be announced soon. Iran and Oman have held on-and-off talks for weeks about controlling traffic through the strait, which handled one-fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas shipments before the war began in February. Most shipping has since been shut down, as Iran and the U.S. have tried to assert control over the strategic channel, imposing separate blockades. Iran and Oman said on Tuesday that they discussed "a joint temporary navigational corridor" through the strait and agreed to clear it of mines. "I am hopeful we will soon announce a temporary corridor for the Strait of Hormuz and practical arrangements to restore safe navigation," Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi posted on X following talks with his Iranian counterpart. U.S. President Donald Trump — who has threatened to bomb Oman — repeated an earlier assertion that all mines in the strait had been cleared, and warned Iran against trying to lay any more. Iran denounces U.S. sanctions push Though active hostilities between the U.S. and Iran have largely subsided, diplomatic efforts to reach a peace deal have stalled, and continuing attacks on ships mean passage through the Strait of Hormuz remains perilous. Iran announced a blacklist on Sunday of 45 ships in an apparent effort to stop ship-to-ship transfers used by Gulf energy producers to evade the Iranian blockade. Some companies plan to stop using vessels added to the blacklist, sources said. In an effort to tighten pressure on Iran's economy, the United States earlier this week threatened to punish countries that continue to do business with Iran, but said it would not impose penalties immediately. The sanctions did not feature Chinese financial institutions suspected of facilitating oil exports from Iran that the U.S. blockade has cut. Iran denounced the U.S. effort to isolate its economy as an act of "gross lawlessness", expressing confidence that many countries would not join the pressure campaign. On Wednesday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi stressed the need to boost cooperation with China during a meeting with Iran's ambassador to Beijing, Iranian state media reported. Oil prices fell for a third day, dropping more than $2 a barrel to a two-week low, following signs of renewed efforts to seek a mediated end to the war that began on February 28 with U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran. Despite ongoing tensions, the U.S. is beginning to send personnel back to some diplomatic missions in the Middle East that were evacuated or downsized amid tensions with Iran, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters. The move suggests Washington sees a lower risk of the conflict with Iran escalating in the near term, though some embassies will initially operate below full capacity. U.S. reportedly not planning new strikes for now Secretary of State Marco Rubio told allies that the U.S. did not expect to launch new strikes against Iran for now, and would instead focus on other means of pressure, Axios reported. Separately, the U.S. Secret Service said on Tuesday that it was aware of a video broadcast by Iranian state television discussing a potential plot to assassinate Trump's youngest son, Barron. U.S. public approval of the war has fallen to its lowest level since the conflict's early days, and Trump's popularity is likewise at a record low ahead of congressional elections in November, according to Reuters/Ipsos polling. Thousands of people have died in the conflict, most of them in Iran and Lebanon, while the U.S. and Israel have degraded much of Iran's conventional military capacity. The exact state of its nuclear program, which the U.S. and Israel aim to dismantle, remains unknown. Iranian army spokesman Brigadier General Mohammad Akrami-Nia said new equipment had been delivered to combat units and fighting against two technologically advanced militaries had provided Iran's forces with significant battlefield experience, according to comments carried on Wednesday by Iran's Mehr News. Additional reporting by Reuters bureaus; Writing by Costas Pitas and Aidan Lewis; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani and Conor Humphries
Iran and Oman plan for temporary Hormuz corridor as impasse with US persists CAIRO ― Iran has held new talks with neighboring Oman on management of the Strait of Hormuz, blockaded over nearly six months of conflict, with Oman's foreign minister saying he was hopeful a temporary c…
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State media reported that U.S. strikes near Tehran and in Semnan province, where ballistic missile and space programs are located, were carried out early Thursday. These incidents followed daylight attacks on Wednesday, indicating a reported increase in the frequency of strikes.
Bahrain and Kuwait say they have engaged with Iranian air strikes, while Iran says it hit a U.S. air base in Jordan.
WTI Rises After Big Product Draws, Tiny Crude Build, SPR Nears 'Tank Bottoms'
Oil prices extended their declines for a third straight day after the US plan to ramp up economic pressure on Iran spared the country’s trading partners from harsher measures for now, while mediators said they were continuing efforts to end the conflict.
“There was a lot of buildup around the announcement but what we got was more a warning about where policy is heading than an immediate shock to physical supply,” said Haris Khurshid, chief investment officer at Chicago-based Karobaar Capital LP. “Until secondary sanctions start changing who can buy, ship or even finance Iranian crude, I don’t think traders have much reason to add another geopolitical premium.”
Oman and Iran said the countries' foreign ministers discussed an agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz under a temporary framework.
Negotiations between the two countries will continue "with a view to agreeing on a permanent navigational corridor and future administration of the strait," the joint statement said.
While positive, an agreement between Oman and Iran wouldn't result in oil flows through the strait returning to prewar levels, ING analysts Warren Patterson and Ewa Manthey said.
"We would likely need to see the U.S. lift its blockade on Iranian ports and ease sanctions on Iran before we see any move towards normalization."
All eyes on domestic supply (and demand) for the next tactical leg...
API
Crude +4.2mm
Cushing +1.0mm
Gasoline -3.2mm
Distillates -459k
DOE
Crude +95k (+500k exp)
Cushing +1.18mm
Gasoline -2.54mm
Distillates -2.23mm
Crude stocks rose for the 4th straight week (but it was a tiny 95k increase) while Cushing saw a modest build off tank bottoms. Product inventories saw large drawdowns..
The Trump admin drained another 3.6mm barrels from the SPR to 289.7 million barrels (1983 lows), approaching the minimum operational level for storage facilities, which ranges between 250 and 300 million barrels.
The combination of a tiny commercial crude build and sizable SPR drain created the biggest net crude drawdown in over a month...
Cushing stocks remain very near 'tank bottoms'
Distillates stocks fell back near 25 year lows and the lowest seasonally on record...
US crude imports from Saudi Arabia picked up recently (but remain well below peak war levels). Crude exports fell below 4 million barrels a day, a threshold closely watched by the market to gauge demand.
US Crude production remains near record highs and while the rig count dipped last week, it is still trending higher overall...
Refining utilization rates are at the highest seasonal level since 1998. That is, in part, due to a shrinking US refining fleet in recent years. But it’s also evidence of how hard fuel-makers are running their plants right now to capture wide margins. They plan to keep that up into the fall, with some companies even deferring maintenance.
WTI was hovering around $81.50 (off the overnight lows) ahead of the official data (down from almost $88 last week)...
Crude is still up about 50% this year as the war - now in its sixth month - continues to disrupt the shipping of crude and refined fuels out of the Middle East.
The impact has been particularly acute in fuel markets, which have also faced a hit from Ukrainian attacks on Russian refiners. That’s helped push premiums over crude to stratospheric levels (but the crack spread is starting to decline)...
At the same time, large volumes of crude supplies continue to transit Hormuz with their satellite signals turned off.
Those volumes are in millions of barrels a day and have helped generally keep a lid on prices that had been expected to soar at the outset of the conflict.
Tyler Durden Wed, 08/26/2026 - 10:40
U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA said it has observed cyberattacks targeting over 100 internet-exposed systems across the U.S. water and wastewater sector, amid a wave of hacks targeting American critical infrastructure. The number of affected systems provides new context to the scale of the ongoing cyberattacks targeting water providers in Michigan, Minnesota, and at least five other states.
The federal agency, which oversees cybersecurity defense and critical infrastructure protections, said in an advisory that the attacks have largely targeted programmable logic controllers (PLCs), which are used to control physical systems and machinery across water providers, energy systems, and other parts of critical infrastructure.
In recent weeks, hackers have targeted PLCs made by several manufacturers, including Rockwell, Schneider Electric, and more recently, Siemens. CISA previously said that the cyberattacks are relying in part on AI tools that rely on public information to develop scripts capable of targeting vulnerable Siemens PLCs.
The intrusions have had little effect on water or waste water supplies to local communities, but have resulted in outages and disruption as incident responders investigate the breaches. CISA previously reported that some of the intrusions allowed hackers to modify affected PLCs to disable shutdown processes and alarms, potentially creating “unsafe conditions” without notifying the affected operators.
Many of the affected communities are in rural or isolated areas, where disruption to critical infrastructure systems can affect a large area of people. Reports citing senior American officials say that U.S. intelligence believes Iran is likely behind the largely opportunistic attacks on water providers, likely in response to the U.
S. and Israel-led war against Iran, but officials have fallen short of a concrete attribution. The intrusions have sparked broader concerns about the cybersecurity and resiliency of critical infrastructure across the United States. U.S. officials have warned in recent years that hackers working for China have been planting destructive malware on critical infrastructure ready to activate as a distraction in the event of an anticipated Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
Russia has also been linked to several cyberattacks on water providers, and power and energy grids, across Europe as part of a growing campaign seen as aimed at testing the NATO alliance.