Brent crude futures gained 6 cents to $78.01 a barrel at 0726 GMT

Oil prices were little changed on Tuesday as investors eyed the impact on oil supply after attacks on ships in the Red Sea disrupted maritime trade and forced companies to reroute vessels.

Brent crude futures gained 6 cents to $78.01 a barrel at 0726 GMT. The front-month U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures contract, which expires on Tuesday, dropped 18 cents to $72.29 a barrel. The more active second-month contract declined 10 cents, or 0.1 per cent, to $72.72.

Given that there has been a prompt collective response from a number of countries to mitigate attacks, it may not provide much conviction that disruptions may be long-lasting and that led to some reservations reflected in oil prices in today’s session, said Jun Rong Yeap, a market strategist at IG in Singapore.

Both benchmarks added more than 1 per cent on Monday on concerns about shippers diverting vessels away from the Red Sea.

Oil major BP temporarily paused all transits through the Red Sea and oil tanker group Frontline said on Monday its vessels would avoid passage through the waterway, signs the crisis was widening to include energy shipments.

Around 15 per cent of world shipping traffic transits via the Suez Canal, which connects the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, offering the shortest shipping route between Europe and Asia.

However, Goldman Sachs analysts said that the disruption to energy flows in the Red Sea is unlikely to have large impact on crude and LNG prices as vessels can be redirected.

We do estimate that a hypothetical prolonged redirection of all 7 million barrels per day of gross (Northbound and Southbound) oil flows would increase spot crude prices relative to long-dated prices by $3-4/per barrel, the analysts added.