The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Bring On the Jet Fuel Shortages || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: April 21, 2026

Even if the Iran ceasefire holds, the world already has a months-long jet fuel shortage baked in. So, start saving for those summer vacation flights. Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihan Full Newsletter: https://bit.ly/4cbWE8C

Peter Zine here coming to you from Savannah, Georgia, one of my favorite cities in the country. Anyway, today we're talking about one of the after effects of the Iran War. Even if the ceasefire holds, which we are looking at a months-long shortage of jet fuel on a global basis, most heavily concentrated on the South Asian, Southeast Asian, Australasian, and Northeast Asian zone. The problem is that jet fuel is very exacting in terms of, its production, whereas diesel or gasoline have a broader band that you can produce them with in the distillation columns and a refinery. In addition, the type of crude, which is kind of a medium-heavy sour, that is your preferred feedstock for most refineries that make jet fuel, is heavily

concentrated its production in places like Kuwait and Iraq and Saudi Arabia. And all that stuff is offline. That was all Gulf-facing crude that couldn't be redirected somewhere else. We've now had a half a billion barrels of oil not be produced and delivered. And the refiners have already taken last delivery from pre-war shipments. We're not going to see new shipments come out in the next two to three months minimum, probably considering that a lot of this stuff is Kuwaiti and Iraqi for over a year. So that means that we're already seeing airlines in China and Japan and Australia and New Zealand and the Philippines, in Vietnam, and India, all canceling flights, not just for like the next few weeks,

but the next few months. There is no good substitute here, because if you say run low on gasoline, some vehicles can switch to diesel, or more importantly, the cargo can switch to diesel. And if you run low on diesel, you can always put some of the cargo on trains or on ships. Jet fuel is for jets, and that's it. So with a relative bottleneck on the feedstock and a relative bottleneck at the refineries and a lack of substitutions we're just out and so we're going to see this cling to the system for at least a year assuming no new shooting that will probably be more shooting