Tim’s view
When the Italian town of Codogno became the first in Europe to enter a COVID-19 lockdown in Feb. 2020, the disease outbreak that Europeans and Americans perceived as someone else’s faraway problem suddenly hit home with more speed and force than anyone could anticipate.
I wouldn’t sleep on the chance that we may hit a Codogno moment in global energy markets soon.
Canceled flights across Asia are a warning to Western markets that they are still severely underpricing the risk of a massive, pandemic-like disruption to the global economy in the coming months. In addition to Asia, flights are already being canceled around Europe. International Energy Agency chief Fatih Birol warned recently that Europe could run out of jet fuel in “six weeks or so.” One well-placed industry source told me backstage during Semafor World Economy that they recently sold several cargoes of jet fuel for more than twice their normal price, and that if the Strait of Hormuz isn’t reopened within a week or two, the situation could become “very, very bad.”
One effect of the short-lived “opening” of the strait on Friday was to further erode insurers’ ability to trust future proclamations of progress; rates are rising again, and in general “oil flows out of the strait are diminishing rather than increasing,” Rystad Energy’s chief oil analyst Paola Rodriguez-Masiu wrote in a note.
Crude prices are poised to spike higher around mid-May, when OECD countries’ strategic reserves begin to run low. Already, refineries across Asia and Europe are cutting their production of jet fuel and other specialized products, unable to charge consumers enough to make their operations worthwhile.
US President Donald Trump’s decision on Monday to invoke special war powers to boost domestic refining might help buffer domestic travel, but won’t help US planes return home from long-haul flights abroad. And while renewables might work for some energy-importing countries as a solution to high natural gas prices, there’s no green alternative for jet fuel — or fertilizer, or any number of other critical refined products — at scale.
It’s impossible to say for sure how this war will pan out, but the lesson from the pandemic is to prepare for the worst and hope for the best — and that means getting cancellation insurance on any flights you have coming up.
Notable
- Brussels is prepared to require jet fuel stocks to be shared across the EU, as the energy crisis in the bloc is moving from one of high prices, to a “crisis of supply,” the energy commissioner told the FT.