Europe has a fuel problem: It doesn’t know how much it has

BRUSSELS — As airlines ground planes and officials urge citizens to cut back on their commutes, Europe’s effort to prevent shortages caused by the Iran war is running into an unexpected hitch: Nobody knows how much fuel the continent actually has.

The scramble comes as the war in Iran drives up Europe’s fossil fuel bill and threatens to choke off supplies moving through the Strait of Hormuz, a key artery for oil and gas. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Wednesday that the conflict is costing the EU nearly €500 million a day in higher energy costs, even as U.S. President Donald Trump has ordered his aides to prepare for a prolonged blockade of Iran that could further disrupt global energy markets.

“In Europe, we have visibility and commitments into May and June … what happens beyond is hard to forecast,” Tobias Meyer, chief executive of DHL Group, said during a press breakfast attended by POLITICO earlier this month. “There are strategic reserves, but there’s not much visibility on how much has been drawn.”

EU authorities aren’t entirely in the dark. Information on government-held oil and gas reserves is generally transparent and up to date, while national officials hold regular information-sharing meetings, and companies occasionally volunteer information about their own stocks. 

But beyond that, officials wanting to know when the taps might run dry have very little to go on — a blind spot that risks leaving them unable to identify shortages or forced to make emergency decisions based on partial information.

At a high-level summit last month, ministers from Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain called attention to these knowledge gaps, urging the EU to coordinate more real-time monitoring and analysis, particularly around refined products, according to minutes seen by POLITICO. Greece’s delegate went so far as to ask the Commission to set up a WhatsApp or Signal channel between member countries and the EU executive.

“We have very limited market knowledge and data for gas and oil,” said one senior European energy ministry official, speaking like others quoted in this article on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter openly. “Our knowledge of what is being put into circulation, and withdrawn, and sent along different routes … there is certainly a lack of market monitoring.”

When it comes to refined fuels like diesel and jet fuel, the picture is especially murky. The EU relies primarily on its official statistics service Eurostat and coordination meetings with member countries to gauge supply levels. But most stocks sit out of sight in scattered commercial inventories spanning diverse sectors, with firms reluctant to disclose sensitive business data that they’re not legally obliged to report. 

Even the data provided by the International Energy Agency — which coordinated the historic release of 400 million barrels of oil last month — is necessarily limited for this reason, said a Commission official. The IEA did not respond to a request for comment.

“In an ideal world, we would have access to perfect information,” the Commission official added. “But in the end, it’s only as good as the information we are given. And I’ve heard colleagues raise the same concern — we hope we have the right information.”

‘We can’t really know’

Since the war began, energy ministers have called on the European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, to bolster the bloc’s ability to gauge the supplies held across the continent in underground facilities, rows of tanks at major ports, vast supertankers bobbing off European coasts, and depots in airports and along key pipelines.

The Commission itself has acknowledged the informational desert, unveiling plans for a “Fuel Observatory” earlier this month that would “track EU production, imports, exports and stock levels of transport fuels” — not unlike the U.S.’s far more comprehensive Energy Information Administration. 

The Strait of Hormuz is a key artery for oil and gas. | Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty Images

“We will of course want to have a better overview of the fuel situation across the EU,” Commission spokesperson Anna-Kaisa Itkonen told POLITICO. “We are working on it, but [it’s] too early to declare now how it will work.”

Gas is the easiest to track, if imperfectly. Rules imposed after the shortages caused by Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine require EU countries to fill up storage levels to 90 percent of national capacity by winter each year. That means the EU is far more aware of how much natural gas it has at any moment — even if it continues to have little visibility into outflows, inflows and cross-border trade.

Eurostat also monitors Europe-wide petroleum products — but updates them infrequently and sporadically. Its last reasonably comprehensive data set is from January, according to Ana Maria Jaller-Makarewicz, an analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. 

At that time, most EU countries — excluding Latvia, Ireland and Cyprus — met the bloc’s requirements to hold at least 90-day stocks of petroleum and petroleum derivatives, according to data compiled by Jaller-Makarewicz. The reserves consisted largely of crude oil, diesel and feedstocks, with limited gasoline and jet fuel.

What has happened since? It’s “quite hard to get an up-to-date overview,” said a second senior European energy ministry official. “We know what they should have in stock. But what they have in any given moment is something we can’t really know.”

It’s even harder to track refined products like diesel, gasoline and jet fuel. “Privately owned companies didn’t want to share info,” a third senior European energy ministry official said bluntly.

“This is unfortunately information that [members] will not share with me,” said Alain Mathuren, a director at fuels lobby FuelsEurope, while emphasizing that his association wouldn’t ask for it anyway, given that doing so might violate EU competition rules.

But despite the profound data gaps, it’s “too early to say” whether the Commission will devise rules to compel countries to keep it informed, said the Commission official cited above. 

Fog of war

What is known isn’t especially comforting. 

Europe’s gas stocks, for a start, were already low before the attack on Iran, averaging under 30 percent of national capacity thanks to sharp drawdowns over the winter. Refilling those reserves depends on incentivizing traders, who generally prefer to pump gas into storage in the summer when prices fall, and sell in the winter when prices rise. But the Iran war risks inverting that dynamic, and EU efforts to resolve the problem have met a mixed reception.  

The rerouting of global energy markets that followed the blockage of Hormuz risks upending that dynamic further. Tankers are no longer being diverted to Asia from Europe but are simply steaming there directly from West Africa and the U.S., said Charles Costerousse, a natural gas analyst at market research firm Kpler.

Deliveries are “still within the five-year average,” he told POLITICO. “It’s just that they are not getting as much as they could be getting, considering all the extra U.S. capacity coming online.” 

When it comes to refined fuels like diesel and jet fuel, the picture is especially murky. | Olivier Chassignole/AFP via Getty Images

Crude oil stocks can also be tracked in near-real time. Kpler, which supplies data to the IEA, assesses the fullness of floating-roof storage tanks by gauging the height of each tank’s roof, inferred by looking at the interplay of shadows in satellite imagery, said Homayoun Falakshahi, a crude oil analyst at the research firm. While storage facilities in China and some underground reserves in Europe can’t be monitored this way, Kpler is able to capture around 90 percent of 6 billion barrels of global capacity using this method, he said.

The IEA’s most recent report details that European inventories were already low in February compared to the year before, but it includes limited data for March. Energy ministries reportedly updated EU authorities on their own inventories last week, but the details weren’t made public. Some countries are already releasing oil stocks as part of an historic, multinational barrel release. 

Tracking jet fuel stocks — held primarily in fixed-roof tanks — is “much more difficult,” Falakshahi said. Data on the fuel is drawn largely from voluntary disclosures by companies, and the lack of transparency is consistent with ongoing disagreements over how much fuel Europe has left.

Other products like naphtha — a key feedstock for plastic products — are easier to monitor. Daily surveys of naphtha storage in Northern Europe by a firm called Insights Global give a good sense of the stocks available, according to Ciaran Tyler, Kpler’s lead petrochemicals analyst.

The data suggests that while some European naphtha supplies are being diverted to Asia — along with other products — Europe’s petrochemical industry is actually benefiting from the closure of Hormuz. However, that only applies to flexible plants that can switch their feedstock from naphtha to ethane and propane.

“Basically, the loss of [petrochemicals] from the Middle East and Asia means European plants are currently enjoying a boost to gross margins,” Tyler told POLITICO.

While shared exclusively on a voluntary basis, the data is useful, Tyler added. “You have to take it with a pinch of salt,” he explained. “Would I put my life savings on what they report? No. But is it directionally correct? Yes.”