Bob McNally, founder and president of Rapidan Energy Group, warns oil prices could move sharply higher if the conflict around the Strait of Hormuz expands to the Red Sea, warning that the market has largely exhausted the buffers that helped contain the initial shock. McNally says China is beginning to increase crude imports again, the available reserve-release buffer is largely spent and refiners are running at precariously high utilization rates. Responding to President Trump’s assertion that the US does not need the Strait of Hormuz, McNally says that may be true in a physical sense but not in a price sense, because disruptions anywhere in the global oil market raise prices everywhere.