Brent settled at $113.88 and WTI at $99.90 on Tuesday

Brent crude futures settled down $1.93, or 1.67%, at $113.88 a barrel on Tuesday, and U.S. West Texas Intermediate settled down $1.86, or 1.83%, at $99.90, Reuters reported. CNBC reported the same closes, describing Brent as down 1.7% at $113.88 and West Texas Intermediate as down 1.8% at $99.90. CNBC said it was the second straight session of lower crude prices. A settlement is a market result. It is not a view on where the next one should be.

Reuters said futures fell by almost $2 a barrel, that prices remained near six-month highs because of disrupted shipping around the Middle East, and that an agreement to end what Reuters called the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran remained elusive. It said Iranian Security Council chief Mohsen Rezaei met Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei on Tuesday, a day after talks with representatives of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan, and that state media said Khamenei had emphasized pursuing Iran’s interests and maintaining its conditions for ending the war. It said the four countries agreed to continue talks, again citing Iranian state media.

CNBC said Khamenei met Rezaei to discuss conditions for ending the war, according to an English post on the supreme leader’s social media account, and that the post quoted him saying the state of “neither war nor peace” needs to end. CNBC also said he discussed keeping control of the Strait of Hormuz. It said Saudi Arabia’s defense minister and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian held talks in Tehran on Monday, with senior military and intelligence officials from Pakistan and Turkey taking part. Those are the two newsrooms’ accounts of the diplomacy. This article does not add a finding about what was agreed.

On the fighting, Reuters said Yemen’s Houthis said on Tuesday that they had struck Saudi Arabia’s Ras Tanura oil refinery, which it called the biggest in the kingdom, with a ballistic missile. This article is reporting that statement as Reuters carried it, not as a finding that the refinery was hit. CNBC said the Houthis have bombed energy infrastructure and civilian targets such as airports in recent weeks, and that those strikes threaten Saudi oil exports which CNBC said have stayed resilient during eight months of conflict. CNBC also said President Donald Trump, in a Fox News interview on Sunday, was approaching a decision on whether to seek a deal with Iran or intensify military operations. That is CNBC’s report of the interview.

Neither report is a prediction of the next settlement. A lower close does not say what a household should pay for fuel, or what anyone should own.