World oil production remains high, but the ability to get oil to consumers is becoming less certain. In other words, the market is not saturated: it is vulnerable. Against this backdrop, geopolitical tensions naturally return to the fore.

Strategic routes increasingly exposed

Incidents are multiplying: attacks on CPC consortium tankers and terminals in the Black Sea, persistent threats in the Red Sea and disruptions off West Africa. Each diversions imposed, each terminal weakened, increases costs and reduces logistical efficiency (passing through the Cape of Good Hope extends lead times by 10 to 12 days). The market is thus discovering that the security of flows has become a major determinant of price - as important as supply and demand or even stocks.

Infrastructure, the new frontier of risk

The current tensions are a reminder of an underestimated reality: oil infrastructures often operate at full capacity, with little redundancy. A technical or security incident is now enough to create a one-off deficit. It is not overall supply that is lacking, but the resilience of the system to absorb disruptions. Oil is thus once again becoming an asset where physical risk - logistical, maritime, operational - can weigh on prices, and at a certain point, more than the supply and demand curve alone.

Desynchronised global governance

These physical constraints are accentuated by producers with very different specificities. OPEC+ is adjusting its production to avoid a lasting downward slide. The United States, faced with a shale sector weakened to around $55-60 a barrel, is arbitrating between supporting production and putting pressure on domestic prices.

With production of more than 3 million barrels a day, China does not even cover a quarter of its daily needs. As a result, it finds itself playing a dual role: as the world's leading importer and as the manager of immense but opaque stocks. China optimises its stocks according to its own industrial and geopolitical priorities. In other words, China is not just a demander: it is becoming an indirect stabiliser or destabiliser of the market.

Europe, meanwhile, remains entirely dependent on external conditions.

The result is clear: national strategies overlap without coordinating, increasing uncertainty for the market.

Towards a permanently more complex market

The dynamic to come will not be that of a classic cycle, but that of a market where external shocks - security, logistical, political - become recurrent. The key question is changing: how much can we really deliver tomorrow, and by which routes? Oil is entering a phase where the security of flows is becoming as strategic as production itself. A more fragmented, but not necessarily more unstable, energy order is emerging.

And yet, the barrel is not taking off

The barrel remains remarkably stable, stuck between 55 and 65 dollars. This growing mismatch between the perceived level of risk and the level of price is becoming the dominant feature of the market: traders are favouring the narrative of future surplus over the reality of present stress.

This is the era of "risk-on without price-on". This paradox - lots of risk, little price - is becoming the hallmark of the current era. Investors believe more in the prospect of a predicted surplus than in visible fragilities. So it seems that geopolitics, even if its form has changed, still plays an important role in setting prices. However, investors no longer react as sharply to announcements; they consider the market as a whole, under weighing each investment decision against fundamental, geopolitical, market and also psychological criteria.