By Ed Ballard, Joe Wallace and Summer Said
It took a few days to close thousands of Middle East oil wells early in the Iran war. The prolonged closure of the Persian Gulf means it will take months or even years for energy flows to recover.
Traffic in and out of the Persian Gulf remains close to a standstill, with the U.S. and Iran locked in a tanker war and diplomatic efforts on ice. Brent crude prices shot back above $100 a barrel this week as oil-hungry sectors across the world came to grips with a closure that is lasting much longer than originally feared.
Analysts and oil industry executives say prospects for a speedy resumption of Gulf crude supplies are worsening. Even if the strait opens tomorrow, the damage to the global economy will be long lasting.
Reanimating the world's most productive oil patch will require overcoming substantial engineering and logistical challenges.
Middle East producers need tankers that have fanned out across the world to deliver their cargoes and sail back, which could take months. Fuel amassed in storage tanks has to get to market to clear space for more oil. Workers who left the region when war broke out must return.
"There's an awful lot of infrastructure that's been shut down," Russell Hardy, chief executive of oil trader Vitol, told an industry event this week. "It takes some time to put all that back."
Goldman Sachs energy analysts said this week that the longer the Strait of Hormuz is closed, the slower the recovery in production will be.
One of the biggest hurdles will be restarting oil wells.
The problems are likely to be most acute in Iraq, the region's second-biggest producer behind Saudi Arabia. In normal times, Iraq pumps 5% of the world's oil. Daily output plunged to about 1.6 million barrels from 4.9 million before the war started at the end of February, said Mohammed Hussein of Iraq Oil Report, an industry publication.
Iraqi oil producers last week made initial test runs of a production restart, government officials said, but hit pause when it became clear Hormuz wasn't opening.
The officials said poor security, an exodus of overseas workers and limited resources have made it hard to assess the state of some fields. Iran-backed militia in Iraq are believed to have been behind recent attacks on oil fields in the country, as well as strikes on energy infrastructure elsewhere in the region.
Some fields will have to be brought back slowly. Paraffin and asphalt-like substances may have clogged wells that pump thick crude. At older fields, pressure is likely to have fallen during the outage. Less oil and more natural gas might emerge when they are revived.
Getting back to 85% of prewar production in Iraq's southern oil fields may take nine months, according to research firm Wood Mackenzie, though the area could achieve around two-thirds of prewar output more quickly.
Closing fields hurriedly, as many were in the early days of the war, can damage wells in addition to equipment such as submersible pumps that lift oil from fields where natural pressure isn't strong enough.
Restarting the fields is costly, so the looming plunge in oil revenue could complicate the restart, the Iraqi officials said. Another obstacle, they said: Iraq doesn't have a state tanker fleet unlike Saudi Arabia, meaning it relies on international traders and shipping companies.
"The longer things are shut in, typically the more complex they are to bring back on," Jeff Miller, chief executive of oil-field-services company Halliburton, told analysts this week.
Exactly how much output will suffer will be a mystery until engineers try to restart production, said Fraser McKay, head of upstream analysis at Wood Mackenzie. He calls it "a really key uncertainty."
Analysts say the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, the biggest producer by far, will have a better time, having carefully managed the pressure of their fields down the decades. Even there, output won't recover at a stroke.
Across the Gulf, around half of oil fields have high enough pressure to return to prewar production rates within two weeks. Around 80% could do so within six weeks, according to the International Energy Agency.
The problematic 20% are mostly in Iraq and Kuwait, the latter of which normally produces about 3% of the world's oil. "Ultimately, some pre-conflict production may not return," the IEA said.
For the oil market, the result is likely to be a long period of uncertain supplies.
Iraq was under more pressure to close production than its neighbors because it has less oil storage and export pipeline capacity. To keep as much oil flowing as possible, Iraq increased exports through a pipeline between the Kurdish region and Turkey, and started trucking fuel oil to Syria's Mediterranean coast.
That amounts to a relative trickle, but "Iraq has no choice but to continue" with those stopgaps, said Yesar Al-Maleki, a Gulf analyst at the Middle East Economic Survey and nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council.
Officials in Iraq are planning for the third major restart of its fields in a generation. Production tanked during the first and second Gulf Wars. It recovered and surpassed Saddam Hussein-era rates in part because of investment from international producers such as the U.K.'s BP and Italy's Eni.
The country's biggest field, Rumaila, is effectively run by a joint venture between BP and PetroChina under a deal with state-owned Iraqi companies. It produces a third of Iraq's crude in normal times from hundreds of wells.
At Rumaila and other Iraqi fields with low pressure, operators inject water to force crude to the surface. In some cases, it takes three barrels of water to pump a single barrel of crude, said Ahmed Mehdi of consulting firm Renaissance Energy Advisors.
He said water mixes with the oil in unpredictable ways while wells aren't pumping, so water output has to be carefully managed when the fields start producing again.
Write to Ed Ballard at ed.ballard@wsj.com, Joe Wallace at joe.wallace@wsj.com and Summer Said at summer.said@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 24, 2026 11:00 ET (15:00 GMT)
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