Heating oil prices.
Simply compared.Heating oil prices.
Simply compared.

What changed. The pause did not hold. Over the weekend American forces hit three Iranian oil tankers after Iran's Revolutionary Guard fired missiles towards an American aircraft carrier and a destroyer, and Iran says it struck three ships linked to America that were crossing the Strait of Hormuz, the sea lane that carries about a fifth of the world's oil, by a route it had not approved. A tanker crossing the Strait on Sunday was hit by three projectiles that nobody has yet claimed. Brent crude, the raw oil before it is refined, climbed back above $95 a barrel on Monday morning and is close to its highest since July, and heating oil has stopped easing with it.

Your next fill. A 1,000-litre fill costs about £1,030 including VAT at the UK average on our tracker, roughly £120 more than a week ago on the same basis. It is almost exactly where it stood on Thursday: the price had begun to drift lower while the guns were quiet, the weekend's strikes stopped that drift, and the first orders of the heating season are adding demand of their own.

The background. The story of this year is still that the world has enough crude oil but not enough working refineries to turn it into fuel, and that shortage tightened again last week. The extra that European buyers pay for diesel over and above the crude it is made from is back above $100 a barrel, a level never seen before this summer, because Ukraine's drones have hit most of Russia's big refineries and Moscow is keeping its diesel at home until at least the end of September, sending Mediterranean ports less than a fifth of what it shipped in the spring. Heating oil comes out of the same part of the refinery as diesel and jet fuel, so it feels that shortage first. Even so, a litre is still about 40p below the 137.6p peak reached in March.

What to watch. First, the tankers: the number of ships willing to cross the Strait fell to about half its usual level last week, and every attack keeps more of them away, which lifts the price whether or not anyone is shooting. Second, 30 September, when Russia decides whether its refineries may sell diesel abroad again, with officials in Moscow already talking about keeping the ban to the end of the year.