Can the diesel and jet fuel shortage be solved?

The nature of the shortage of diesel and jet fuel is more complex than most people realize. Based on my analysis, a shortfall has existed since at least 2020. The shortage is not simply the result of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

In this post, I will provide background information regarding the nature of the shortfall and the international conflict it is leading to. I will also share my thoughts on how, over the long term, the situation might be mitigated. I doubt whether a solution will be available in the short term, but I can at least give readers an idea of one direction in which a possible workaround might be available.

My idea is that the economy needs to transform itself in a way that uses diesel and jet fuel (grouped together on some reports as “middle distillates”) more sparingly. At the same time, research on extracting heavy oil and bitumen at lower cost is needed. If this is done, it may be possible to use additional heavy oil to increase the supply of diesel and jet fuel.

One thing that will probably need to change is the price of diesel relative to gasoline. The price difference will likely need to be even greater than it has been in the recent past because heavy oil is inherently more difficult to extract, refine, process, and transport.

[1] The interconnected nature of the economy means that inexpensive energy products are extremely important to the economy.

Energy supply and the economy are a great deal more interconnected than most people realize. For example, if the price of diesel rises, the price of food also tends to rise because diesel is used in food production and transportation. Similarly, if the price of gasoline rises, the additional cost also tends to squeeze budgets. Politicians see these price increases and say to themselves, “These increases will make voters unhappy. Let’s raise interest rates and see if we can get oil prices back down.”

Higher interest rates don’t affect everyone immediately, but they particularly impact people purchasing a vehicle or a home, and businesses seeking a loan.

Clearly, raising interest rates at the same time as energy prices are rising is “playing with fire.” If the economy is really overstimulated and growing too quickly, this type of approach makes sense. But if the underlying problem is that diesel and jet fuel prices are high because of inadequate world production, what is really needed is higher oil prices, especially for the heavier crude oils that provide a disproportionate share of diesel and jet fuel.

Consumers and oil producers have two different needs for prices:

• Consumers want diesel and jet fuel prices low because high prices wreck their budgets. Diesel is used in growing food and transporting it to market. Jet fuel is used in transporting some kinds of foods. In fact, industries of all kinds (including mining, road building, and construction) use diesel and jet fuel. Higher prices of these fuels tend to make practically any kind of goods or services more expensive.
• Oil producers want diesel and jet fuel prices high, to incentivize investment in new wells. Without additional investment, the quantity of heavy oil extracted and made into these fuels will tend to decrease because of depletion issues.

While prices for diesel and jet fuel are higher this fall, quite a bit of the extra charges relate to extra transport and insurance costs. The high prices need to stay, and perhaps even increase, even if the immediate issues disappear, in order to incentivize greater long-term production. It is these rising prices that are likely to continue to squeeze budgets and push economies toward recession.

[2] What we call “oil” can vary quite widely from well to well. The trend over time has been toward lighter crude oils.

Most people assume that all oil is equivalent, but this is not the case. Petroleum is a mixture of hydrocarbon molecules. The lightest ones are gases are room temperature, the medium weight ones are liquids, and the heaviest ones tend to be quite viscous. Some are even solids. Some oils, especially heavy oils, have sulfur or metal inclusions. Crude oil that contains sulfur is called “sour oil.”

Heavier oils are ones that disproportionately produce diesel and jet fuel. Lighter oils tend to produce more gasoline, along with products like solvents, and the feedstocks for plastics.

In my view, a major reason why there tends to be a shortfall in diesel and jet fuel production (even apart from the current Middle East blockages) is that the type of oil needed tends to be more expensive to extract, refine, and transport than light oil. Furthermore, oil with sulfur tends to be quite corrosive, and removing the sulfur adds another layer of costs. The primary issue I see is that it is hard to pass on the higher production costs of heavy and sour oils to customers.

In theory, to cover all the costs involved related to heavy and sour oils, diesel and jet fuel prices should be quite a bit higher than gasoline prices for the same volume (liter or gallon). But if this were the case, the price of food would also increase, since diesel is extensively used in food production and transportation.

Figure 2 shows end products from the production process. We know, however, that lighter end products tend to come from lighter crude oils, so we can deduce that the crude oil mixture has been getting lighter over time. The amounts in Figure 2 include natural gas liquids, which are very light and growing in quantity.

The earliest oil that was extracted tended to be “medium oil,” which tended to have a mixture of heavier and lighter molecules. As the medium oil depleted, new production tended to be lighter. In particular, US tight oil from shale is quite light. The increasing production of US tight oil from shale is adding to the Very Light layer, as well as the Gasoline layer.

[3] The world had a diesel and jet fuel shortage long before 2026.

Because of the need for diesel and jet fuel in industry and transportation, a person would expect per-capita diesel and jet fuel consumption to grow as industry and international trade grows.

Figure 3 shows that per capita consumption of diesel and jet fuel stopped growing about 2005. The year 2005 seems to be the time that the world’s output of “conventional” (easy to extract) oil reached a peak. Figure 3 also shows that per capita consumption then plateaued until about 2019. It fell 16% in 2020, and it has not been able to fully recover since. The historical data on this chart is only through 2025, but the big Middle East cutbacks in 2026 will clearly send diesel and jet fuel consumption down from the 2025 level in 2026, as indicated by the red arrow.

At least in part, what is happening is that recent oil prices have not been high enough for countries producing somewhat heavy, sour oil. This is especially the case for oil exporting countries that depend on oil revenue to support their economies. They need more revenue than just enough to cover the cost of extraction, plus a reasonable return for shareholders. They also need money to fund the development of make-work projects to employ their citizens and to fund subsidized imported food for their population.

In the peak oil community, there seems to be the view that Middle East oil is always cheap to extract and refine. At one time, this may have been true, but most analyses overlook the tax needs of oil exporting countries. Tax needs are high in countries with exploding populations who need subsidized imported food. Huge make-work projects to provide employment possibilities, such as Saudi Arabia’s construction of the city Neom, add to the need for higher tax revenue. Middle Eastern oil costs may also be rising because of depletion issues, such as wells yielding relatively more water in the oil/water mixture extracted.

[4] For oil exporters, one symptom of chronically inadequate prices for heavy/sour oil (including the need for high tax revenue) is the willingness to engage in war.

If a person looks through my suggested list of heavy/sour oil producers shown on Figure 4, all the countries seem at least somewhat war-like. Even Canada tends to be war-like. Canadian leaders would be much happier if the price of crude oil exported to the US were considerably higher, and it would be less inclined to seek export partners in Asia and Europe.

If the oil production of the heavy/sour countries and country groups found on Figure 4 is added together, the result is as shown in Figure 5. The total production of these countries exceeds the production of the rest of the world.

Notice that the countries of the Middle East tend to be quite price sensitive. Their production dropped steeply in 2020 when oil prices fell. Likewise, their production rose in 2022 when oil prices were temporarily higher, related to the start of the Ukraine-Russia conflict.

[5] Authorities claim that there would be plenty of heavy oil to refine if prices were to rise high enough for long enough.

The United States Geological Services provides maps of available heavy oil and bitumen deposits. Figure 6 indicates that heavy oil is widely available in North America, Europe, Russia, and the Middle East.

In 2015, the International Energy Agency published a report indicating that in its view, there were huge deposits of extra heavy oil and bitumen (EHOB) that could be accessed if the price of oil rose high enough for long enough (Figure 7). The same exhibit shows somewhat smaller availability of tight oil from shale. In fact, the US has been able to access a substantial amount of tight oil from shale in recent years.

In my opinion, in order to access the EHOB, the prices of diesel and jet fuel need to rise to a high level over the long term; the prices of gasoline and even lighter products don’t necessarily need to rise. If the prices of diesel and jet fuel rise high enough, for long enough, the price signal should work its way back to oil and gas companies, suggesting that they need to make investments in the direction of adding more extraction from EHOB. If this succeeds, it could perhaps relieve the problem of inadequate supply of diesel and jet fuel.

The prices of diesel and jet fuel are high now, but this is at least partly due to higher insurance costs and partly due to the extra costs related to shipping oil longer distances to avoid blocked straits. These extra costs don’t get back to oil companies in a way that encourages countries to extract more heavy oil. What is needed are permanently higher prices for diesel and jet fuel, relative to the price of gasoline, even if the problems with respect to the straits of Hormuz and of Bab al-Mandab, disappear.

[6] Today’s conflicts in the Middle East and Russia/Ukraine seem to relate to inadequate supplies of diesel and jet fuel for buyers of these fuels, and inadequate prices for sellers of the heavy/sour oils yielding these products.

Figure 3, above, shows that the total supply of diesel plus jet fuel has been low, especially since 2020. One issue that has arisen recently is “Who gets the supply of diesel plus jet fuel that is available?” Figure 8 shows that increasingly, it has been the poorer countries of the world who obtain the diesel and jet fuel that is available. Note that total consumption of the Other than Advanced Countries has exceeded that of the Advanced Countries since 2020.

Figure 9 shows that for the Advanced Economies, per capita consumption of diesel plus jet fuel has been declining since about 2005–the time of peak conventional crude oil. The same figure shows that per capita consumption of diesel plus jet fuel has plateaued since 2013 for Other than Advanced Countries. I think of 2013 as the year that China first started encountering major limits on coal extraction (somewhat like the year 1970 in the US for oil extraction). In recent years, China has been able to raise coal extraction somewhat, but at a higher cost.

I would expect that countries in both groups would be dismayed by the situation shown in Figure 9. The per capita consumption of diesel plus jet fuel for the Advanced Countries has been falling for a long time. Partly this is the result of the economies changing to service economies. As service economies, the need for diesel by industry has been lessened. Wages tend to be less for many of these service jobs, making workers unhappy.

In Figure 9, people in the Other than Advanced Countries would tend to be dismayed by the continued wide gap between the standard of living of their own economy, and the standards of living in the Advanced Countries. Many of these countries export extracted resources that are ultimately sold as goods to people living in Advanced Countries. If the selling prices of these commodities were higher, workers in these countries could perhaps afford to have cars and air conditioning, like workers in the Advanced Countries. They would also be dismayed by the poor progress in raising their own per-capita consumption of diesel and jet fuel since 2013.

[7] Is there any possibility of greatly ramping up heavy oil production? Could it power a society like the one we have today?

We know that heavy oil production began long ago. For example, the first recorded production of heavy oil began in the Kern River Basin in California in the 1860s, and commercial production began there in 1899. The first production in the Canadian Oil Sands began in 1921, and commercial production there began in 1967.

The extent to which the oil that is heavy and often sour can be ramped up in the future remains to be seen. Extraction techniques have gradually been improving, and I would expect that they can continue to improve. But the cost of extraction and processing will likely remain somewhat high because of all the energy-intensive steps that are needed to provide diesel and jet fuel.

I expect that society itself will need to change in order to make use of this higher-cost oil. These are a few ideas I have:

(a) Oil exporting countries will need to change in ways that reduce their need for tax revenue. This is an issue especially in the Middle East, which has a huge population, in a hot, dry climate. The population will likely need to fall (for example, many migrants and guest workers may need to move back to their country of origin), and make-work projects will need to be discontinued.

(b) Another issue is that total diesel and jet fuel usage will likely need to be reduced because it is likely to take several years before production of heavy oil can be ramped up. Society will need to be reorganized in a way that uses less diesel and jet fuel. One idea would be to shorten supply chains whenever possible. Figure 10 illustrates one idea how this might be done.

(c) I expect that if such a change can be made, economies will need to gradually change in ways that are hard for us to understand now. The focus may need to be on essentials, including food and clothing. Governments may need to be smaller and provide fewer services. Communities may need to be smaller and more walkable. The total population may need to be lower.

[8] Conclusion

It seems to me that the self-organizing nature of economies will gradually push them in the directions they need to go if the world is to start incorporating a significant quantity of expensive products made from heavy oil into its energy mix.

We cannot yet imagine what all the changes will look like. In some ways they may resemble a recession, but there will likely still be an interest in greater complexity and in working to improve people’s lives.