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financial news agency, october 5 (editor zhao hao)on friday (october 4) local time, u.s. president biden stated at a briefing that israel has not yet decided how to respond to iran’s previous attacks.

biden added,"if i were them, i would consider other options besides attacking iranian oil fields."

biden also mentioned that the u.s. and israeli teams have been in contact.israelno decision will be made immediately, so the united states will continue to wait.

in contrast, biden said the day before that he did not support "iran’s nuclear facilities”carry out retaliatory strikes.

affected by this statement, wti's intraday increase narrowed from 2.4% to less than 1%; brent narrowed from 2% to less than 0.6%. however, due to the huge fluctuations in the past few days, the two major benchmarks increased by 8.1% and 9.1% respectively this week.both had their best week in a year and a half.

brent crude oil futures main price daily chart

daan struyven, chief oil analyst at goldman sachs, said oil prices would rise by $10 to $20 a barrel if the israeli attack caused iran's oil production to fall by 1 million barrels per day for a period of time.

how high oil prices will rise depends on whether opec uses its spare oil production capacity to fill the gap, struyven added. he pointed out that before tuesday, the oil market had barely taken the conflict in the middle east seriously, and "even now the geopolitical risk premium is still relatively mild."

at the time of struyven's interview, brent oil was trading at $77 a barrel, which is still below what goldman sachs considers a fair price based on inventory levels. he explained that despite high geopolitical tensions, there had been no sustained supply disruptions in the past two years.

according to data from the goldman sachs analysis team, there are about 6 million barrels per day of idle capacity on the sidelines on the sidelines. once this capacity comes back online, it should offset the tight situation caused by most supply disruption scenarios.

however, daniel ghali, senior commodity strategist at td securities, and others have pointed out that the world's idle oil production capacity is mainly concentrated in the middle east, especially the gulf countries. if a larger-scale war breaks out, this part of the production capacity may also be at risk.