The Trump administration on Thursday intensified its pressure campaign to convince its European allies to release diesel from national emergency stocks. The White House says additional diesel from Europe would increase global supply and potentially contain surging prices.
The average price of diesel in the United States has soared 70% since the start of the war with Iran, reaching $6.38 per gallon on Thursday, according to AAA.
With less than five weeks before the U.S. midterm elections, Republicans are eager to find a way to lower domestic fuel prices.
“Our European partners should accelerate compliance with their existing commitments and immediately make additional supplies available to address ongoing disruptions” in energy markets, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Thursday. “American farmers, truckers and businesses should not bear the burden of a global diesel shortage. »
Shortly after Bessent’s message, Trump told reporters that “we might” ask Europe to release some of its emergency reserves.
Earlier this week, US Energy Secretary Chris Wright expressed confidence that Europe would agree to exploit its reserves.
“You will hear announcements from our friends in Europe about new supplies of diesel coming to market that will significantly lower diesel prices,” Wright told reporters Wednesday during an event with Trump in the Oval Office.
But as of Thursday evening, these announcements had not materialized.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said he raised the diesel issue at a meeting of G20 trade ministers in Milwaukee this week. But he stopped short of suggesting that Washington had secured firm commitments regarding emergency reserves.
“We would love to have a collaborative response” to the global diesel crisis, he told Bloomberg News on Thursday.
Also in Milwaukee were trade ministers from China, India, the United Kingdom and other countries affected by the strain on global diesel supplies.
However, so far the message from Europe on diesel reserves has been evasive.
The EU is “in very close contact with our member states on this topical issue”, European Commission energy spokesperson Anna-Kaisa Itkonen told reporters at a press briefing in Brussels.
“We also have high-level contacts with the US administration,” she said.
The majority of Europe’s emergency diesel reserves are stored in Germany and France. U.S. and European oil refineries have been operating near full capacity for months, producing as much diesel fuel as possible.
While the war in Iran is responsible for most of the rise in crude oil and unleaded gasoline prices worldwide, the price of diesel has exceeded both since July, although for a different reason.
Russia has traditionally been a major exporter of diesel, but that stopped this summer after Ukrainian drone strikes destroyed Russian refineries.
On July 8, Russia banned the export of diesel in order to preserve its domestic supply. On Wednesday, the Kremlin extended this ban until the end of October.
“We are running out of diesel because we lost our diesel exports from Russia,” Wright said at the White House. “We’ve lost diesel, some diesel exports from the Middle East, even though we’re restoring them. And we’ve lost diesel exports from China.”
“That’s a lot of interruption,” he said.
But the question of whether Europe will tap its emergency diesel reserves to increase global supply is complicated by the fact that the Trump administration is actively considering a move that is effectively the opposite of what it is asking Europe to do.
On Wednesday, the president considered imposing a ban on U.S. diesel exports.
“I’m thinking about it,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “I talk to Chris and Doug about it a lot,” he said, referring to Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.
“They kind of think … it will help diesel, but it might raise the price of other products,” he said.
A ban on the export of American diesel would hit European countries particularly hard.
It would also come at a time when average unleaded gasoline prices in the United States remain nearly 50% higher than they were on February 28, the day the United States and Israel attacked Iran.
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