The debate over the 2026 energy crisis has so far focused on the price of crude oil. That is not the best indicator. The problem lies not only in the availability of oil, but also in the capacity to refine it — the industrial capacity to turn it into usable fuels. And on that front, the signals are unambiguous: in Europe, diesel stocks are at their lowest since 2022, with those at the Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Antwerp hub at their lowest since 2014; in the United States, they are hovering near a twenty-three-year low. Refining margins (the difference between the price of crude oil bought by a refinery and the price at which it resells the refined products) are hitting record levels — 74.66 dollars a barrel in Europe in early August, more than 93 dollars on the other side of the Atlantic — while refineries are running at full capacity. The International Energy Agency puts the year-on-year decline in global refining throughput at five million barrels a day. As of August 5, twenty-six countries were experiencing fuel shortages, nine of them with specific alerts on jet fuel.
This strain is no isolated accident: it stems from the convergence of several shocks that reinforce one another. The most paradoxical comes from Russia, a country that structurally produces twice as much diesel as it consumes and that should, in theory, act as a shock absorber for the global market rather than a source of crisis. But a wave of Ukrainian drone strikes has knocked out several of its major refineries — including the one at Omsk, the country’s largest — forcing Moscow to ban all diesel exports in July, after already doing the same for gasoline and kerosene. China illustrates a different logic: not a lack of capacity, but strategic withholding. Jointly holding, with the United States, the world’s top rank in refining capacity, and having exported in 2025 more fuel than Germany’s annual consumption, it has suspended the entirety of its gasoline, diesel, and kerosene exports since March in order to secure its domestic market — a political choice, backed by penalties on import quotas for refiners that fall short, whose fallout has been felt as far as Southeast Asia. The United States, for its part, spent months acting as supplier of last resort by increasing its fuel exports — an increasingly untenable position as its own refineries approach saturation.
To these cyclical shocks is added an underlying problem that predates the crisis: global refining capacity is growing by barely more than one million barrels a day per year (against a total capacity of 103 to 106 million barrels a day in early 2026), with most new facilities being built east of Suez while the Atlantic basin — the United States and Europe — keeps closing sites without replacing them.
The foreseeable consequences are already taking shape. In Europe, the fragility of diesel supply compounds that of natural gas — whose reserves, barely half full at this time of year, are suffering from the same disruptions — a combination that casts a real shadow over the coming winter should temperatures turn harsh. More broadly, refining margins this high guarantee that the bill will remain heavy for truckers, farmers, and industrial users alike, whatever the posted price of crude.
But it is in the Global South that the human cost is already the most visible: in Kenya, the rise in diesel prices triggered protests in May that were put down by police, leaving at least four dead and around thirty injured in Nairobi, before President Ruto backed down on prices in June; in Mozambique, a 46% price increase paralyzed transport in Maputo through a strike by private minibus drivers; in the Comoros, the same kind of increase left one person dead in clashes. The mechanism is structural: many African states set fuel prices administratively, which shields them in normal times from market swings — but exposes them directly to popular anger the moment the subsidy becomes unsustainable, even though they have no real influence over the global prices they are forced to pass on. Southeast Asia and Latin America, where diesel underpins power generation, agriculture, and freight, remain just as exposed.
What remains is the question of how this will play out, which depends on variables largely beyond immediate control: the trajectory of the conflict in the Middle East, the pace of reconstruction of Russia’s refineries, whether China’s export embargo is maintained or lifted, and the very slow pace of investment in Western refining capacity. Absent a rapid de-escalation, this strain is likely to persist through the winter of 2026-2027 — fueling, in the Global South especially, a growing distrust of great powers whose wars of choice, fought far from their own borders, are inflicting very real economic and human damage on them.