The Uplift

Air BP Italia capped jet fuel at 2,000 litres per aircraft at four Italian airports. A typical A320 carries 24,000. Twenty-eight European refineries have closed since 2009. The IEA says Europe has six weeks left.

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On April 6, Air BP Italia issued emergency NOTAMs for four northern Italian airports: Bologna, Milan Linate, Treviso, and Venice Marco Polo. The notices capped Jet A-1 uplifts at 2,000 litres per non-priority aircraft. Priority: ambulance flights unrestricted, state flights next, commercial flights exceeding three hours after that. Everything else --- 2,000 litres. A typical Airbus A320 carries between 18,000 and 26,000 litres for a standard service. Two thousand is barely an hour of flight.

Within two days, the restriction expanded to seven airports. Brindisi ran dry. Pescara and Reggio Calabria joined the list. At Brindisi, aircraft arrived with pre-positioned reserves --- no fuel was available for purchase on the ground.

Ten days later, Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, told the Associated Press from IEA headquarters in Paris: “Maybe six weeks or so of jet fuel left.” He called it “the largest energy crisis we have ever faced.”

The Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed to most commercial tanker traffic since February 28. Europe imports more than 40 percent of its jet fuel through it.

The Bologna NOTAM is not a logistics failure. It is a receipt.

Between 2009 and 2025, twenty-eight European refineries were closed or converted --- old, high-carbon, expensive to retrofit, uncompetitive against Gulf mega-refineries built to process crude at scale. France lost approximately 30 percent of its refining capacity. Italy and the United Kingdom each lost around 20 percent. In April 2025, Grangemouth --- Scotland’s only refinery, its sole domestic source of kerosene --- ceased crude processing. Britain now operates four refineries. It imported more than three times as much kerosene as it produced in 2024.

Each closure was individually rational. Gulf refineries had lower input costs, newer equipment, fewer regulatory constraints on carbon emissions. Al-Zour in Kuwait reached full capacity in early 2024: 615,000 barrels per day. At times, Kuwait alone covered roughly a quarter of European jet fuel imports. One facility in the Persian Gulf producing more aviation fuel per day than most European countries consume.

The chokepoint risk was not hidden. Energy security assessments have documented the Hormuz dependency since at least the Tanker War of 1984—1988. Industry analysts watched the import share grow. The IEA published the numbers. What did not happen was the political processing of documented risk into structural mitigation. The gradient was tracked. It was not governed.

And the gradient had a twin. When Europe closed its refineries, it did not simultaneously build a monitoring architecture for the import dependency it was creating. The European Commission does not maintain real-time jet fuel stock data. Airlines for Europe --- the trade association representing Air France-KLM, Lufthansa, and Ryanair --- has urged Brussels to provide real-time information on airport fuel stocks. Fuel suppliers resist: disclosing commercial data to their major clients. The result: when the Hormuz closure converted thirty years of accumulated dependency into an emergency measured in weeks, Brussels learned about it from a civil aviation notice issued by a fuel subsidiary of BP, capping kerosene at a regional Italian airport.

The infrastructure gap and the monitoring gap were produced by the same logic. Close the refinery --- it is uncompetitive. Skip the surveillance --- the data is commercially sensitive. Each decision locally sound. The cumulative effect invisible until the external condition changed and both arrived at once.

What exists instead of the Gulf supply is instructive.

The Dangote Refinery in Nigeria --- 650,000 barrels per day, the largest single-train refinery in the world --- is now exporting aviation fuel to Europe. In March, 44,000 metric tons reached Milford Haven in the United Kingdom. Dangote was built for Nigerian domestic supply and regional African export. Its appearance in European supply chains happened under emergency conditions --- not by design, not through established corridors, not by contract. This is what energy diversification looks like when forced: ad hoc, unoptimized, dependent on the industrial capacity of a Nigerian refinery rather than the strategic foresight of a European institution. It extends the timeline. It does not replace Hormuz.

Ryanair has hedged approximately 80 percent of its fuel at $67—77 per barrel through March 2027 --- the strongest position among major European carriers. CEO Michael O’Leary has warned of supply disruptions from May, with 5 to 10 percent capacity cuts possible through the summer if Hormuz stays closed. The hedge is arithmetic protection, not structural. It delays the price signal reaching passengers. It does not change what the signal says.

The crisis is uneven. Spain, with eight domestic refineries and net-exporter status, faces a different situation than Italy or Britain. The seven Italian airports hit first were not the weakest in the system --- they were the ones supplied by Air BP Italia, whose pipeline ran through the vulnerability before the others. The geography of rationing is a map of supply chain architecture, not national preparedness.

Birol told the AP that government leaders have been calling him. “Many government leaders tell me that if Hormuz is not open until end of May, many countries --- starting from the weaker economies --- are going to face huge challenges… from high inflation numbers to coming close to slow growth or even recession.” The end-of-May timeline aligns with Ryanair’s hedge horizon, with ACI Europe’s systemic-shortage warning issued April 14, with the arithmetic of six weeks counted from mid-April. The timelines converge because they measure the same structure from different angles.

On April 22, the European Commission plans to publish its first EU-wide mapping of refining capacity for oil products. The vulnerability it will describe took thirty years to build. Air BP Italia described it on April 6, in one number: 2,000.

Sources

- Solen