Europe’s 2026 jet fuel crisis was the reported prospect, in April 2026, that the continent would exhaust its supply of jet fuel within six weeks. John Kiriakou opened his programme with it on the day it broke, taping on 16 April: “Breaking news this morning that Europe, listen to this, how crazy this is. Europe will run out of jet fuel in 6 weeks.”[1] His assessment of the consequence was immediate — “That would lead to an economic calamity that will ripple across the entire planet” — and the questions he put to his guest were how such a thing could be negotiated, and how anyone gets out of it.[2] He credited the report to the Associated Press, calling it “this craziness from the Associated Press,” and asked whether there was any precedent for it.[3]
Why the fuel stopped
The economist Richard D. Wolff, answering on the programme, said he knew of no real precedent and traced the shortage to the Strait of Hormuz rather than to any exhaustion of crude. Roughly a fifth of the world’s oil passes through the strait, he said, along with a large share of the derivatives of oil — jet fuel among them, together with plastic and fertiliser.[4] Kiriakou interjected with the figure he returns to elsewhere: “Fertilizer. 65% of the world’s fertilizer.”[4]
When Iran closed the strait to all but a trickle of shipping, the consequence Wolff identified was one step further down the chain than the headlines suggested: “the oil that needs to be refined to produce jet fuel wasn’t arriving at the factories that convert regular petroleum to jet fuel.”[5] The crude was not gone; it was not arriving where it had to be processed.
Why Europe had no cushion
Two failures, in Wolff’s account, left the continent without a buffer. The first was commercial: European airlines had not laid in stock, which he put down partly to “cheapness on the part of the European airlines” — jet fuel is expensive, and they did not want to pay to hold it for long periods.[6] The second was political. “The Europeans had not been told by the United States about the attack. They had not been warned. They had not had time to prepare.” They had assumed, he said, that the United States would coordinate with them, and they were wrong.[5][6] The consequences of that failure to warn are treated separately under Europe and the 2026 Iran war.
The fuel shortage arrived alongside a price shock. Oil, Wolff said, had moved from around sixty to seventy dollars a barrel to “well in excess of $100 a barrel” and was still rising as they spoke — a rise he expected to produce a recession and, if it ran a few months longer, a global depression.[7][8]