Brent crude traded at $98.67/bbl in early London dealing on 1 October, up 0.6% on the session, while WTI rose 0.5% to $90.09/bbl. Both benchmarks had lost more than 1% intraday before recovering, as traders weighed a rebound in Gulf crude flows against an unexpected 922,000 bbl build in US commercial stockpiles.

The price stability follows Saudi Aramco's restart of oil tanker loadings at Yanbu terminal on the Red Sea, after the operator resumed flows on the East-West Pipeline. The pipeline carries crude from eastern Saudi fields to Yanbu, bypassing the Strait of Hormuz.

Its interruption earlier in the week had tightened regional supply and helped drive Brent's roughly 14% September rally — its largest monthly gain since July. WTI rose about 5% over the same month.

On the demand side, US commercial crude inventories climbed by 922,000 bbl to 427.3 mbbl in the week ending 25 September, according to the US Energy Information Administration. A Reuters poll of analysts had projected a 264,000 bbl drawdown, leaving the actual build roughly 1.2 mbbl off consensus.

What is the US-Iran track adding to the tape?

Diplomatic activity in the Gulf dominated the news flow but produced no firm read on near-term supply. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said on 1 October that Tehran had received a US response to its latest proposal on reviving a collapsed Gulf ceasefire. He added that the Iranian side had not been formally notified of any rejection.

A day earlier, US President Donald Trump said he had rejected the proposal, which reportedly included a US lifting of its blockade on Iranian ports and an Iranian pledge to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within a week.

The conflicting accounts left refiners and traders without a clear answer on whether sanctions relief and a return of Iranian crude to floating storage were near-term risks. The Strait of Hormuz handles roughly a fifth of global seaborne oil shipments, and any sustained disruption would dwarf OPEC+ quota arithmetic.

Will OPEC+ adjust quotas for November?

Two sources told Reuters the eight participating OPEC+ producers — Algeria, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Oman, Russia and Saudi Arabia — are likely to keep output targets unchanged when the group convenes online on Sunday.

The bloc completed the final phase of a 1.65 mbbl/d voluntary supply-cut rollback in September and held October quotas flat, leaving little room for additional barrels before year-end. Opec and Russian officials declined to comment ahead of the meeting.

What to watch

The watch item is Sunday's virtual OPEC+ ministerial review, where any deviation from the status-quo target would reset the supply outlook for November loadings. Secondary watch: the next round of US-Iran diplomacy, which could pivot on whether Trump's stated rejection or Araqchi's account reflects the actual state of play on the ceasefire proposal. Tertiary: the next EIA weekly petroleum status report for confirmation of the inventory build's persistence and any read on refinery runs heading into the autumn turnaround season.