“This Is Unprecedented”: Goldman Sachs Sees 3 Simultaneous Crises Pushing Oil as High as $120 a Barrel
Three of the world's most critical oil shipping lanes are shutting down at once, and Goldman Sachs says nothing in modern market history offers a playbook for what comes next.
Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS | GS Price Prediction) analyst Samantha Dart walked Bloomberg viewers through a commodities picture on August 3, 2026 that she says has no clean precedent in modern oil markets. Three separate geopolitical crises are simultaneously constraining flows through the Hormuz Strait, the Red Sea, and the Black Sea, a triple squeeze on the chokepoints that carry the world’s crude and refined product.
“This is unprecedented. And it really reminds us that even though we’re so used to thinking of commodities as these global markets, your supply side can be incredibly geographically concentrated,” Dart said in the segment titled Where Does Oil Go Next After the Hormuz Crisis?
Who Is Samantha Dart
Dart is Co-Head of Global Commodities Research at Goldman Sachs, one of Wall Street’s most closely followed seats for oil and natural gas forecasting. Her framing matters because Goldman’s scenarios feed into how hedgers, sovereigns, and institutional investors position around energy risk. Commodity markets trade globally, but are produced in a handful of places and shipped through an even smaller handful of straits. When several of those straits go offline at once, the “global market” assumption breaks down.
Persian Gulf Flows: From 80% Back To 40%
The most tangible piece of Dart’s update was the direction of Persian Gulf exports. “They had gone from 40% of normal to 80% of normal. And then this escalation happened. And now we’re back near those 40% of normal type of flows,” she said.
That reversal matters because the first ramp happened while global inventories were still cushioned. The EIA’s May 2026 Short-Term Energy Outlook assessed that production shut-ins averaged 10.5 million barrels per day in April and were expected to peak at nearly 10.8 million b/d in May, with Brent averaging $117/b in April and hitting $138/b on April 7. Since then, global oil inventories have continued to fall, which is why Dart emphasizes that the second recovery, if it comes, will be slower. There is no longer a fat storage buffer to draw on while flows normalize.
The Scenario Spread: $70 To $120
Dart laid out two clearly labeled scenarios.
The base case: “Our base case is that you would have production from the Persian Gulf normalizing, say by early Q4. If that were to happen, we could have Brent crude oil prices averaging Q4 at about $80 a barrel. We could have next year. That would be our base case averaging about $70 a barrel.”
The worst case: “The worst case scenario that we’re working with at the moment is, let’s say if we only have a gradual improvement over the course of next year, we would be looking at 120 a barrel in Q4 this year, and next year could average around 100 a barrel.”
For context, Brent has already tested both ends of that range in 2026. The benchmark hit a peak of $138.21 on April 7 and a trough of $61.08 on January 7, a swing that dwarfs the $22.71 full-year range Brent traded in 2025.
Winter Heating: The Upside Risk
Dart flagged a specific vulnerability window heading into the colder months. “When you think of diesel or heating oil, a lot of that also has stronger demand in the winter for heating purposes. So I would say for those two products in particular, that’s the main upside that we’re worried about,” she said.
The empirical support is fresh. Henry Hub natural gas spiked to $30.72/MMBtu on January 23, 2026, well above the $9.86 January 2025 peak, illustrating how quickly winter demand can overwhelm a tight supply picture. The EIA also estimated that more than 2,020 Bcf of natural gas was withdrawn from storage over the November-March heating season, or 4% more than the five-year average.
What To Watch
The key variable is the speed of geopolitical resolution. A durable de-escalation across all three chokepoints would let rising U.S. production and potential OPEC expansion pull prices back toward the base case. A drawn-out standoff pushes the curve toward the worst case, with heating fuels layered on top. Any headline suggesting fresh flow interruptions could reignite the volatility that defined the first half of the year.
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AJ has spent the past 10 years writing about financial markets at The Motley Fool. His coverage centers on technology stocks and the broader macroeconomic trends, from interest rates to geopolitics, that shape where markets are headed next. AJ is drawn to the stories where big-picture economics and individual companies collide.
