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Comment by pteetor | Hacker News Reader

In the USA, the available supply of gasoline is normally 21 or 22 days. The press occasionally trumpets this number, and people react with horror. But, hey, it's just normal. IDK about Europe, but 6 weeks of jet fuel does not surprize me.

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This comment got me wondering, how long do you think you could run your tap if there was a complete loss of water just outside your house?

I didn't time it exactly, but the last time I was able to observe it happening it was about half a minute for me.

Does jet fuel go bad in the same way as gasoline? Might not be possible to keep enormous amounts on hand without a FIFO reservoir. Or would they normally keep oil on hand and refine it as required?

Fuel goes bad mostly only when mixed with bio fuel, which allows bacteria to grow which does not happen for pure fossile fuel. Additives may degrade, too - but they can be mixed after long term storage. So jet fuel which is basically identical to diesel (except additives) can be stored unlimited.

Petroleum diesel and jet fuel degrade via oxidation, hydrocarbons react with oxygen to form gums, varnishes, and sediments. Biocontent does accelerate degradation but without additives most diesels will be severely degraded at most in 12 months. That’s before we get into water contamination and fun things like Cladosporium resinae.

6 weeks stored isn't surprising, but what's happening now is that they are getting their last deliveries from the Gulf (those ships that left before this idiotic war began). They won't be getting resupplied until the Strait of Hormuz is open and then probably weeks after that for the deliveries to arrive.

In some ways it's as if the universe is conspiring to stop people traveling so much and burning so many fossil fuels. When COVID hit, we had severe curtailing of travel for a while. Now we have insanity fueling (heh) another disruption that may cause a even larger hit to travel. This story is about air fuel, but I'm sure that we'll be seeing similar effects at some point for cars, etc.

I'm sure it's just that we have the combination of economics that value hyperconnectedness and politics that are skeptical if not negative on hyperconnectedness. New problems will keep showing up, up until the day it changes.

Exactly. This is a pipeline architecture, you don't buffer more than absolutely necessary. What matters is how much fuel is flowing, not what the storage fill size is.

Right now it seems like we've entered a detente where (1) Iran controls the strait and allows oil to flow with tolls and (2) the US lies about it and pretends (for domestic consumption) like it's interdicted all tolled commerce.

Jet fuel in particular is more complicated than that. At the moment, most of the shipping passing through the straits are coming to and from Iran. I believe only a few ships for other countries have transited, none of them tankers- the GCC countries are not willing yet to acknowledge Iran's control over the Straits, since doing so would be to admit that this war was a giant catastrophe.

Iran, for sanctions related reasons, is unable to make international grade jet-fuel. Only the GCC countries can (in the Persian Gulf). And so not a single tanker of jet fuel has transited the Straits of Hormuz to Europe since this incredibly dumb war started. Iran does export raw crude to China, which refines it to international grade jet fuel, and China is getting some shipments from Iran, but China's raw crude imports have dropped, and they have responded by ending jet-fuel exports to the rest of Asia.

My understanding is that Europe can produce jet-fuel from the North Sea deposits, but they rely on imports because it is not sufficient for their consumption (My memory is that 'domestic production' was on the order of 60% of consumption). So as long as the Straits are blocked to GCC traffic there will be problems for European commercial aviation, getting worse over time.

Is there a cite for that explanation? That doesn't sound right to me. My understanding is that almost all Hormuz oil is crude, the refineries are elsewhere.

Which part? That GCC countries export refined Jet-A? Kuwait was responsible for 15% of seaborne jet fuel exports in 2025 (1), something like 10% of the world's total exports. In 2024, Bahrain exported 20 million barrels of jet-a (2). South Korea, #1 in the world, exported 90 million barrels in 2025- all by sea- (3), so Bahrain isn't a dominant player, but it's still an important amount.

Obviously most of ROK's oil was crude imported to South Korea for re-export elsewhere, but the GCC has spent the last few decades trying to get up the value chain of petro-chemicals and capture more of the value themselves.

1: https://www.vortexa.com/insights/jet-fuel-margins-hit-record... 2: https://www.data.gov.bh/explore/dataset/petroleum-products-e... Note that Bahrain's data explorer doesn't cover 2025, just 2024. 3: https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2026-04-07/busines...

Yeah, those number seem cherry-picked. The fact that refineries exist in gulf isn't saying that refinery capacity doesn't exist elsewhere to manage the crude that is transiting the straight. It doesn't mean they do either, but I'd want to see a deeper analysis than any of that stuff you're linking.

Supply chain management is hard, but it's not nearly as fragile as people tend to fool themselves into thinking. How many chip or egg shortages have we lived through which showed up as pretty routine price disruption? And that's especially true in areas like fuel, which everyone recognizes as national security issues worthy of careful study and planning.

My gut says that's bunk, basically. Europe isn't running out of fuel.

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