Jet fuel prices have roughly doubled since the start of the war in Iran, a price increase even sharper than the spikes seen in gasoline and diesel.
In response, airlines around the world are cutting routes, raising fares, adding fuel surcharges and boosting baggage fees.
Loading...
In Asia, some countries have been rationing fuel and restricting exports to cope with the profound shock to fuel supplies and to jet fuel in particular. "This is an Asian crisis," says George Shaw, an analyst at the trade analytics firm Kpler. "They're in a worse position than anyone else."
In Europe, one group rang alarm bells. The Airports Council International Europe, a group representing airport operators, sent a letter to the European Commission earlier this month warning that if "significant and stable" passage doesn't resume through the Strait of Hormuz by the end of April, "systemic jet fuel shortage is set to become a reality for the EU" — although some analysts are skeptical that shortages would set in so quickly.
The world's 3 top jet fuel producers have been knocked out
Traffic of ships through the strait of Hormuz remains at a trickle. That affects jet fuel, one of many products refined from crude oil, in two different ways.
One, the Persian Gulf is home to many refineries that make jet fuel and export it around the world. The disruption at the strait is blocking that finished product from making it to market.
And two, crude oil from the Gulf — the unprocessed stuff — is typically shipped to refineries around the world, including to significant producers of jet fuel in Asia. The near-closure of the strait is blocking that raw material too.
The finished product and the raw material are both feeling supply shocks. "It's really a double whammy," Shaw says.
To put the scale of this disruption into perspective: The top three global exporters of jet fuel are China, South Korea and Kuwait. China has banned exports of jet fuel and South Korea has had to cut back on production, in both cases because they can't get enough crude to make it. And Kuwait can make jet fuel just fine — but can't send it anywhere.
That's the three top global suppliers of aviation fuel, all essentially knocked out of business simultaneously.
U.S. can't fully escape the global crisis
Europe and Asia have been particularly affected because they rely directly on crude oil and refined products shipped out of the Persian Gulf. But even the U.S. — the world's largest oil producer and a net exporter of jet fuel — is interconnected to this global system.
California has been importing some jet fuel from Asia "for quite a while," says David Ruisard, the head of U.S. products assessment at the commodities intelligence group Argus. Refineries have been shutting down in California, with some companies citing the state's environmental regulations as a factor.
Meanwhile, the U.S. makes abundant jet fuel in refineries in Louisiana and Texas, but that fuel would have to travel down to the Panama Canal to make it to Los Angeles; it's actually cheaper and easier to bring in a tanker from South Korea, which is in a crunch now. "It could be a problem for imports reaching that market" along the U.S. West coast, Ruisard says.
Delta Airlines says it's going to cost an additional $2 billion this quarter
In the U.S., major airlines used to practice fuel hedging, using financial instruments to lock in prices for fuel in advance. That paid off when prices spiked, but cost money when prices fell, and U.S. airlines have stopped doing it, calculating that it wasn't worth it. That means in this current price spike, they're stuck with a giant bill.
Delta Airlines recently estimated, on an earnings call with investors and analysts, that higher fuel prices would cost them an additional $2 billion this quarter. And Delta is actually relatively better off than most airlines because they own a refinery of their own.
"We woke up this morning with a very different set of fuel assumptions than we had when we went to bed," said Delta CEO Ed Bastian, speaking metaphorically about the dramatic shift in prices since the war began. He said Delta was cutting back on unprofitable flights, and "recapturing" higher fuel costs by raising prices for customers — who still seem to be buying tickets, he said.
But Delta isn't worried about shortages within the near future, he says. Shaw, with Kpler, says that raising ticket prices and cutting unprofitable routes should be enough to keep shortages at bay, at least in the U.S. and Europe — Asia may be a different story.
Prices expected to remain elevated
Even if ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz went back to normal tomorrow, prices would stay high for weeks.
It takes time to restart production in the oil fields in the Middle East forced to shut down because they had nowhere to put their crude. It takes time to get the complex processes of a refinery back up and running. And that's assuming the refineries are functional; Rystad Energy has estimated that oil and gas facilities in the Middle East have suffered as much as $50 billion worth of damage from the war.
And once everything is back up and running? Well, then it takes time for tankers full of oil and fuel to travel around the world — a built-in delay that has helped buffer some importers from shocks in the past few weeks, but means they now also face a long gap before feeling relief if the war does resolve.
Last week, according to Argus, the last shipment of jet fuel to pass through the Strait of Hormuz arrived in Europe. It had been loaded on Feb. 28, before the war began; it took weeks to make its journey.
No more deliveries are en route now. And if the strait reopened and a tanker left today, it would still be weeks before it arrived.
"The market's effectively seized up," says Shaw. "It will take a long time for it to get back to a semblance of normality, even in the most optimistic scenario."
Sign up for the NPR Planet Money newsletter
Copyright 2026 NPR
