South Korea has secured supplies of more than 270 million barrels of crude oil via routes unaffected by the US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, a senior official said on Wednesday.
“I hereby report to the nation that visits to four countries have secured the import of 273 million barrels of crude oil by the end of this year,” Kang Hoon-sik, Chief of Staff to the President, said.
The amount is sufficient for more than three months of South Korea’s oil needs, Kang said after he returned from a trip to Kazakhstan, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.
Oil prices dropped, extending a sell-off Tuesday that saw West Texas Intermediate dive around eight percent and Brent more than four per cent.
Investors were also cheering the decision of Israel and Lebanon to open direct talks after meeting in Washington, marking a rare diplomatic breakthrough between two countries formally at war for decades.
Lebanon was drawn into the broader war when Hezbollah attacked Israel in support of Iran, its key ally, triggering an Israeli ground invasion.
Washington fears the Israel-Hezbollah conflict could unravel the US-Iran ceasefire.
Some observers warn that while the end of the war would be widely welcomed, there were big question marks over what a peace would look like, while crude production would take some time to get back up to capacity.
And on Tuesday the International Monetary Fund said it had cut its 2026 global growth projection, warning that the world economy could be “thrown off course” by war.
On announcing a new forecast of 3.1 per cent expansion — down from its previous 3.3 per cent estimate — Fund chief economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas told AFP it was “planning to upgrade growth for 2026 to 3.4 per cent” if not for the war.
