Europe’s Fuel Crisis Is a Policy Failure Decades in the Making

Europe is about to discover that strategic complacency has an expiry date — and the bill is being presented at the gate of every major airport on the continent.

Seven weeks after the US-Israel war on Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, the International Energy Agency’s Fatih Birol has warned that Europe has roughly six weeks of jet fuel remaining. Airports Council International Europe has written urgently to the European Commission warning of a “systemic jet fuel shortage” unless stable Hormuz traffic resumes by the end of April. Several European airports have quietly instructed airlines to prepare for no-fuel scenarios. Summer 2026 — 170 million international arrivals, €851 billion in tourism activity, 14 million jobs — now hangs on the outcome of a geopolitical crisis Brussels spent years insisting was containable.

It is not containable. It never was. And the failure is not principally a failure of forecasting. It is a failure of policy.

Consider the structural facts. Roughly 40 per cent of Europe’s jet fuel supply travels through the Strait of Hormuz. Around 75 per cent of the continent’s aviation fuel imports originate in the Middle East more broadly. Jet fuel prices have risen 130 per cent year-on-year to $1,710 per metric tonne. More than 5 per cent of flights on recent days have been cancelled — twice last year’s rate. And ACI Europe has now formally admitted that the EU possesses no bloc-wide system to track jet fuel production or stock availability in real time. Regulators, in the most literal sense, are flying blind.

These are not the metrics of an energy policy. They are the metrics of an abdication.

The contrast with Israel is instructive — and damning. Israel maintains strategic and commercial fuel reserves equivalent to at least three months of consumption, aligned with IEA recommendations and built over decades on the unsentimental premise that hostile neighbours are a permanent variable. The Bazan refinery complex at Haifa Bay continues to process crude domestically despite being within missile range of Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Iranian regime itself. The 1975 Sinai withdrawal agreement obligates the United States to supply Israel with oil for up to five years in an emergency — a diplomatic backstop negotiated before most of Europe’s current leaders entered politics. Whatever one thinks of Israeli policy on other questions, the country has understood something Brussels has spent a generation trying to wish away: sovereignty requires material preparation, not rhetorical posturing.

Europe’s failures are specific, and they have authors.

Ursula von der Leyen’s European Commission presided over a regulatory regime — the Green Deal, the Fit for 55 decarbonisation package, escalating emissions charges — that rendered European refining structurally unprofitable and accelerated the closure of precisely the infrastructure now required to weather an external shock. Shell ended crude processing at its 147,000 barrel-per-day Wesseling refinery in Germany in March 2025. BP is cutting roughly a third of capacity at Gelsenkirchen, its largest German site. Petroineos converted the Grangemouth refinery — the last major refinery in Scotland — into a fuel import terminal in 2025. Eni shuttered Livorno. ExxonMobil closed Slagen in Norway. Nearly 400,000 barrels per day of European refining capacity disappeared in 2025 alone, and the IEA now estimates that up to 1.5 million barrels per day could follow by 2030.

Here is the quiet scandal beneath the headline. The jet fuel Europe now scrambles to import is produced in Middle Eastern, Asian, and American refineries operating to environmental standards that Europe refuses to permit at home. The Green Deal did not reduce refining emissions. It exported them. What Brussels banned locally, it continues to burn in its own airliners — just refined somewhere else, shipped further, and sold back to European consumers at a premium. This is not climate policy. It is climate outsourcing, dressed in the vocabulary of virtue.

The second failure is the absence of dedicated refined-product reserves. Council Directive 2009/119/EC requires Member States to hold ninety days of net imports or sixty-one days of consumption — but the obligation can be met largely with crude oil, and no Union-level rule specifically mandates a strategic reserve of jet fuel. ACI Europe’s own letter to Brussels implicitly conceded the point: it asked the Commission to begin assessing “commercial and strategic reserve levels” of aviation fuel — a request that would be redundant if such reserves were systematically tracked.

Worse, the Commission has mandated a replacement that does not exist at scale. The ReFuelEU Aviation regulation requires airlines to blend 2 per cent sustainable aviation fuel this year, rising to 70 per cent by 2050. Actual global SAF production in 2025 is expected to reach approximately 0.7 per cent of jet fuel demand — at up to five times the cost of conventional fuel in mandated European markets. Brussels legislated demand for a product the continent cannot yet produce, while simultaneously permitting the closure of the refineries that might one day have produced it. The policy is incoherent on its own terms.

The third failure is strategic. Europe outsourced the defence of its own energy supply lines to the United States, then criticised Washington when it acted. When the Houthis began attacking Red Sea shipping in late 2023, the US and UK launched Operations Poseidon Archer and Rough Rider — offensive strikes designed to degrade Houthi capabilities. The EU response, Operation Aspides, was explicitly restricted to a “purely defensive” mandate. Spain vetoed a more aggressive posture. Member states declined to participate in strikes on Yemeni territory. The result is visible in the data: Red Sea transits remain around half their pre-crisis level, and European frigates escort ships through waters their own rules forbid them to make safe. The Americans blockade. The Europeans complain. Neither position reflects sovereignty.

None of this was unforeseeable. The Hormuz chokepoint has been identified as a first-order vulnerability in every serious energy security analysis for thirty years. Shell’s Wesseling closure was announced in January 2024; BP’s Gelsenkirchen cut in March 2024; Grangemouth’s conversion the year before. The warnings stacked up in orderly files on desks in Brussels while the Commission drafted another communiqué on sustainable aviation fuel.

Europe did not stumble into this crisis. It legislated its way into it, decommissioned the infrastructure that might have prevented it, mandated replacements that do not exist, and declined to defend the supply lines on which it depended. The aircraft on the apron this summer will burn whatever fuel they can find. When the tanks run dry, the policy papers will not fly.