The War Premium: Why Crude Won’t Trade Like the Baseline

In today’s oil market, shaped by escalating geopolitical tensions and structural uncertainty, crude prices are trading well beyond traditional supply and demand fundamentals. In this article, Daniel Osorio, Head of Energy Desk at Hedgepoint Global Markets, explains why oil is not simply trading the 2026 baseline, but instead embeds a meaningful “war premium”.

Daniel examines how concentrated risks in the Middle East, the strategic repositioning of military assets in the region, and the intensification of energy infrastructure attacks within the Russia–Ukraine conflict are reshaping market risk perception. Rather than reflecting an immediate shortage narrative, current pricing reveals a deeper asymmetry: a market comfortable with the average outlook, yet increasingly sensitive to tail risks capable of triggering abrupt repricing.

The article frames this geopolitical premium against the supply–demand baseline and explores why the market may tolerate the mean.

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If you only traded the 2026 baseline, crude should feel heavier. Supply growth looks adequate versus demand growth, and in a stable world that normally drags prices toward gravity: rallies fade, the front end relaxes, and volatility compresses.

But this isn’t a stable world, and oil isn’t a “stable world” commodity.

The market is behaving like a system that can live with a comfortable average, but can’t afford a bad tail. That’s the war premium: the dollars embedded in crude to insure against disruption risk that is low probability, high impact, and increasingly plausible. Reuters puts that premium around $7–$10/bbl, and the important detail is the assumption: it’s still priced around no sustained interruption.

That distinction is the whole story. A premium priced for escalation is not the same as a premium priced for interruption. The market can carry a few dollars of headline insurance. It can’t afford to be wrong about the plumbing.

Middle East: this isn’t sentiment, it’s physics — and posture

The Middle East premium isn’t a political opinion. It’s structural. When risk concentrates around a transit chokepoint, the payoff isn’t linear. You don’t need a full closure scenario for the market to reprice; you only need enough uncertainty that shipping, insurance, and buyer behavior shifts from “business as usual” to “defensive posture.”

Once that behavior shifts, the physical market tightens at the margin even if global production is unchanged. Freight costs rise, war-risk premia widen, some cargoes delay, routes and load programs adjust, and buyers start paying up for prompt optionality. This is why the war premium is sticky: it isn’t just a view on geopolitics, it’s the market pricing the possibility that a small incident forces a large repricing.

And right now, the signal isn’t only market pricing—it’s posture.

Aircraft carriers are scarce assets. They don’t move for headlines. They move when decision makers want credible options and deterrence capacity on short notice. Reuters reported the USS Abraham Lincoln entered the CENTCOM region in late January, and later reported the USS Gerald R. Ford heading toward the region to join Lincoln amid Iran tensions.

Two carriers in the broader Middle East picture doesn’t mean disruption is imminent. It means the risk set is being managed as more immediate than before. Markets react to that because it changes probability weighting. Even if disruption remains low probability, the impact is so large that a small increase in probability justifies a larger premium.

This is also why I don’t think the key question is “is the premium justified?” It is. The better question is whether the premium is pricing the right scenario. Today’s pricing looks consistent with “escalation risk, but continuity of flows.” If the market ever has to price “continuity is uncertain,” the repricing won’t be incremental.

Russia–Ukraine: winter turns energy into the battlefield

Russia–Ukraine reinforces the premium in a different way: winter makes energy leverage more powerful because heat and power aren’t optional. When demand peaks, attacks on energy infrastructure generate maximum economic and social stress.

Reuters reported President Zelenskiy saying Russia launched more than 400 drones and around 40 missiles aimed at Ukraine’s energy sector. The strategic logic is clear: target generation and the grid when the penalty for outages is highest.

Ukraine has pushed back by taking the fight into Russia’s fuel chain—refineries and depots—because that’s how you impose cost and operational friction. Reuters reported a fire at Russia’s Ilsky refinery after a drone attack. Reuters also reported a drone-caused fire at a Lukoil refinery near Ukhta. And Reuters reported Ukrainian drones striking an oil depot in Russia’s Pskov region, triggering explosions and fire. Reuters separately reported the Volgograd refinery halting processing after a drone attack and fire.

This isn’t a clean “X mb/d removed” story—and that’s exactly why it matters. It’s a friction story: downtime, repairs, rerouting, higher security and insurance costs, and the rising probability that a future strike lands on something more consequential. Winter amplifies the effect because both sides need energy more than ever, so energy infrastructure becomes a higher-value target and escalation incentives increase.

How this sits against the S&D baseline

The supply–demand baseline sets gravity: where prices would want to settle if geopolitics cooled and the system was allowed to behave normally. The war premium is what prevents the market from falling into that gravity well with confidence. And Reuters’ framing tells you exactly how the market is positioned today: it is paying a $7–$10/bbl premium while still assuming no sustained disruption.

That creates the asymmetry. If geopolitics cools, the premium decays and the baseline reasserts itself. If the market has to price a shift from “risk” to “interruption,” the repricing is fast—because oil doesn’t wait for certainty when chokepoints and infrastructure risk are involved.

Bottom line

I don’t think crude is trading a shortage story. But it’s also not trading a calm surplus story. It’s trading a baseline where the average outcome is manageable, overlaid with a war premium because the tails are close enough to matter.

Reuters’ estimate captures the moment: a $7–$10/bbl premium priced on the assumption that disruption doesn’t happen. The carrier posture is a visible reminder that the scenario set has widened. And winter energy warfare in Russia–Ukraine reinforces the premium by adding persistent friction to both the grid and the fuel chain.

That’s why crude won’t trade like the baseline. The average may be fine. The tail is what sets the market’s behavior.

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