Jet fuel shortages are becoming a serious problem for Europe

Europe has “maybe six weeks or so of jet fuel left.”

That’s what Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, told the Associated Press in an interview on Thursday. The price of jet fuel has been an issue for weeks now, since soon after the conflict in the Middle East began.

Birol said if the Strait of Hormuz doesn’t reopen, and oil doesn’t start moving more freely around the world soon, availability will become a big issue too.

Before Charles Duncan flew to London from Boston for a business trip earlier this week, he wanted to make sure he’d be able to get home. Duncan is a partner with AltitudeX Aviation Group.

“As this trip came together, I was monitoring the situation, not wanting to get stuck,” he said. “Fortunately, we’re not there yet. But it is a concern.”

Duncan was previously an airline executive for 30 years. He’s experienced fuel shortages, but said he’s never seen anything like the current situation, where there’s a very real, growing possibility of global jet fuel shortages.

“Over my career, I have been involved several times with an individual, localized fuel supply shortage. So a pipeline can break, fuel tanks can be contaminated,” he said. “This is something the industry has never really had to deal with before, certainly in our lifetimes.”

Europe is most dependent on jet fuel imports from the Middle East. Samuel Engel, an aviation economist at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, said the IEA is right to be warning of the risk of shortages.

“Europe imports a third of its jet fuel, of which 75% is coming from the Middle East,” he said.

It takes weeks for fuel to get from the Middle East to Europe. And the last shipment that made it through the Strait of Hormuz arrived last week, Engel said.

“This doesn’t mean that planes are going to stop flying on June 1,” he said.

But it could mean airlines will start canceling more flights, and ticket prices will rise even higher.

Leonard Berberi, aviation editor for the daily newspaper Corriere della Sera in Milan, Italy, said Italians are getting worried.

“We have a bunch of people writing emails and asking us at the newspaper, ‘Hey, do you have any visibility on our flights for July and August? Because we have already booked the flights,’” he said.

And the answer, he said, is not really.

“What the sources tell us in Italy, then also in Europe, is that we have jet fuel for May, for sure, but after May — we have no idea,” Berberi said.

Europe has been buying more jet fuel than usual from the U.S., but it’s not enough to make up for what it’s losing from the Middle East.