Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser delivered a warning during an earnings call that the oil market will not return to normal this year unless the Iran conflict is resolved within weeks.

Since the first quarter of 2026, global markets have lost approximately 1 billion barrels of oil due to disruptions tied to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Current weekly losses sit at roughly 100 million barrels while the strait remains closed.

The Strait of Hormuz is the narrow waterway between Iran and Oman that handles around 20% of global oil trade. Saudi Aramco has responded by cutting its own oil output by 2 million barrels per day. December 2026 oil futures have surged 47% as traders price in the possibility that this disruption has no quick fix.

Nasser indicated that if swift resolution doesn’t materialize, normalization of the oil market could slip into 2027. The potential for this to become the largest supply shock in oil market history is real. Previous disruptions, including the 1973 Arab oil embargo, the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, all caused significant market dislocations. But the cumulative volume lost here, 1 billion barrels and counting, puts this crisis in a category of its own.

Mitigation efforts have included rerouting shipments through alternative routes and tapping into strategic petroleum reserves. These measures have provided temporary relief, keeping the most acute shortages from spiraling into full-blown energy crises in importing nations. Strategic reserves are finite by definition and were designed to bridge short-term disruptions, not sustain global consumption through a multi-quarter shutdown.

Compounding the problem is something Nasser has flagged before: years of underinvestment in oil infrastructure. The infrastructure gap means there’s less spare capacity to tap, fewer alternative pipelines to activate, and a thinner margin of error across the entire supply chain.