Brent Is Back Above $91. Ethiopia Buys $4.2 Billion of Fuel a Year — and Subsidises It by $128 Million a Month.

Brent crude traded at $91.15 a barrel on Monday morning, September 1, at 9:40 a.m. Ethiopia time — up 0.7% on the day, after closing 2.7% higher the previous session. West Texas Intermediate was at $86.46.

Ethiopia spends roughly $4.2 billion a year importing fuel. That is the line on which every dollar of Brent lands.

The number that actually matters is a ship count

Renewed fighting in the Gulf has throttled the Strait of Hormuz. On Monday, only five visible commodity vessels crossed it — and none of them were liquid tankers. The recent daily average is about fourteen.

The strait historically carried around one-fifth of the world's oil supplies. Current flow is estimated at roughly 6 million barrels a day. Iran closed the waterway on February 28 following US and Israeli attacks, and nearly 3 million barrels a day of Gulf refining capacity remains offline.

For an importing country, that distinction matters more than the price screen. A high Brent price is expensive. A missing tanker is a shortage. Earlier disruptions this year already delayed more than 180,000 tonnes of planned fuel shipments to Ethiopia — fuel that was bought, scheduled and simply did not arrive on time.

Who absorbs the difference

Ethiopia does not pass the full world price through to the pump. Trade and Regional Integration Minister Kassahun Gofe has put government fuel subsidies at as much as $128 million a month.

Annualised, that is a subsidy line in the region of $1.5 billion — against a $4.2 billion import bill. In other words, the state is currently standing between the Strait of Hormuz and the Ethiopian motorist, and doing so at a cost equivalent to roughly a third of what the fuel itself costs to buy.

That wall has already been moving. According to the IMF, gasoline prices in Ethiopia have been raised by about 30 percent since early March 2026. The subsidy is being wound down into exactly the market conditions that make winding it down hardest.

Why this isn't a one-week story

Analysts expect oil to stay above $80 a barrel through 2026. That is not a spike assumption; it is a new baseline assumption. And the two pressures compound rather than alternate: a higher barrel price raises the import bill, while a constricted strait raises the delivery risk on volumes already paid for.

For a country rebuilding its foreign-exchange position — the same reserves the central bank has been working to accumulate through gold purchases and market-based FX auctions — a $4.2 billion hard-currency obligation that reprices upward with every Gulf headline is the most exposed item on the list.

Two things to watch: whether the vessel count through Hormuz recovers toward fourteen, and whether the next domestic price adjustment comes before or after it does.

Sources:

• Birr Metrics — "Brent Tops 91 US Dollars as Renewed Gulf Fighting Threatens Ethiopia's Fuel Bill" (September 1, 2026)
• Subsidy figure: Trade and Regional Integration Minister Kassahun Gofe, via Birr Metrics
• Gasoline price adjustment and price outlook: International Monetary Fund; International

Energy Agency, via Birr Metrics

Editorial note: The ~$1.5bn annualised subsidy figure is this piece's own arithmetic on the minister's stated "as much as $128 million monthly" — it is an upper-bound extrapolation, not a government-published annual total, and is labelled as such in the text. Confirm the vessel-count and Hormuz flow figures against the IEA before publishing if a primary citation is required.