Oil prices climb in choppy trade on US stockpile data and Hormuz talks

Only five commodity vessels transited the waterway on Tuesday, preliminary data from ship tracker Kpler showed, down from the 10-day average of 15 and well below pre-war levels.

Efforts to reach a broader settlement to the Iran conflict are also continuing. Pakistan and Iran made "significant progress" in talks, Pakistan's interior minister said on Tuesday at the end of a visit to Tehran.

Energy supply disruption linked to Russia's war on Ukraine, showed no sign of easing. Russia's fourth-largest oil refinery and second-largest gasoline producer NORSI suspended crude oil processing on Wednesday after a Ukrainian drone attack, three industry sources said.

Russia is considering stepping up its ballistic missile strikes on Kyiv, including targets in the city centre, and on critical infrastructure elsewhere in Ukraine after concluding that efforts to negotiate a peace deal have reached a dead end, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, citing three people close to the Kremlin.

(Reporting by Georgina McCartey in Houston, Anushree Mukherjee in Bengaluru, Enes Tunagur in London, Yuka Obayashi in Tokyo and Siyi Liu in Singapore. Editing by Elaine Hardcastle, Mark Potter and Barbara Lewis)