Odd Lots · Bloomberg

Javier Blas on Why Oil Could Go Much, Much Higher

April 1, 2026·41 min·3 clips

Forget crude oil prices; diesel in Singapore is approaching $200 a barrel, a level never seen before.

Oil is higher, obviously. Traci puts the puzzle plainly: the Strait of Hormuz is supposed to be the scary thought experiment, yet prices still do not look like panic. Joe tightens it. Brent started the year around 60, moved to around 70 before the war, and is now around 115. That is a big move, but still below the peak levels of 2022. So why not 200? That almost casual question does the work, because the risk sounds enormous while the market is acting as if the details still matter. Then the clip turns to U.S. natural gas. With global energy markets tense, American gas has come down and is trading almost at a six-month low. That sounds ridiculous until the guest gets into the machinery. Gas is not oil. It cannot be sent anywhere at will. You need a giant fridge. To export it, gas has to be cooled to minus 160 Celsius, turned into liquid, loaded onto a tanker, and pushed through limited capacity. That bottleneck explains a lot. U.S. and Canadian natural gas can stay locally soft while the wider energy market feels jumpy. The excerpt starts with the price chart, then keeps asking what sits underneath it and who can actually move molecules from one place to another. The answer is practical, not mystical. Oil anxiety, gas prices, shipping limits, liquefaction, and export capacity belong to the same messy system, but stress does not move through that system evenly. The ads break up the tape. The main thread survives: market panic needs scary scenarios, but it also needs physical and financial plumbing that can turn those scenarios into actual scarcity.

As heard by us

A grounded look at why energy markets are not reacting like the headline risk says they should.

Odd Lots keeps coming back to the gap between geopolitical oil risk and what prices actually do. It revisits the old nightmare of a Strait of Hormuz closure, then puts Brent's move from around 60 to 115 beside the fact that the market still does not look panicked.

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Why you'd press play

When oil should be screaming, but still isnt.

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