More than 1 billion barrels of oil have gone missing | CNN Business

The good news: The Strait of Hormuz is open again, after Iran and the United States signed a memorandum of understanding this week. Oil hasn’t been coming out of the Middle East for nearly four months. All told, the world lost 1.15 billion barrels of oil supply during the war, according to analytics firm Kpler. That has left the oil market in a precarious state, and it’s rapidly approaching a breaking point. The International Energy Administration’s strategic petroleum reserves are at their lowest levels since 1990. The American emergency reserve is at a 43-year low. And commercial inventories have hit operational stress levels. “You want to see bedlam?” President Donald Trump said at the G7 in Versailles Wednesday. “We run out of reserves in about four weeks.” Trump is right. But reopening the strait this week may not get oil out of the Persian Gulf fast enough to prevent crude inventories from effectively running to empty. The oil market certainly believes Trump’s timing is impeccable. Prices have, as he predicted, fallen like a rock in recent days as the memorandum of understanding with Iran took shape and went into effect. Brent crude prices began falling after