“…Birol said Europe had “maybe six weeks or so [of] jet fuel left”, AP reported. His comments add to those of Airports Council International Europe, a lobby group that last week wrote to the EU’s energy and transport commissioners saying the bloc was three weeks away from shortages.
Airports and airlines tend to have about six weeks of fuel supplies in normal times, according to people in the industry. However, the Iran war has dragged on long enough that any extra reserves in the system are being used up, and other suppliers do not have enough capacity to replace supplies that come through the Gulf.
“In the past there was a group called Dire Straits,” said Birol. “It’s a dire strait now, and it is going to have major implications for the global economy. And the longer it goes, the worse it will be for the economic growth and inflation around the world.”
The impact will be “higher petrol prices, higher gas prices, high electricity prices”, Birol told AP, with some parts of the world “hit worse than the others”.
Some airlines have cancelled flights that would be loss-making because of higher fuel prices, particularly if they did not have hedging arrangements in place to insure against big increases…”