Britain’s diesel market is being held together by reassurance and reserve tanks

Britain has been told, once again, not to panic. That instruction usually arrives when there is at least some reason to be uneasy, and diesel is no exception. After Donald Trump threatened to cut off US supplies, the UK government moved quickly to deny that a shortage is coming.

Transport minister Keir Mather said on Friday that the country draws diesel from a range of sources and that the system is, in his words, inherently resilient. He said people should still be able to go to the pump and fill up, while the government works with European partners and officials in the US administration to keep flows into Britain moving. The message was plain enough: no shortage, no drama, carry on.

The facts behind that calm are less glamorous. The UK relies on the US for about 30% of its diesel, though most of the fuel comes from mainland Europe. It also has reserve supplies for 42 days. That is a useful cushion, but hardly a reason for complacency when the market is already under strain and the country’s refining base is a shadow of what it once was. Britain had 18 refineries in the 1980s; now it has four.

One of them is about to disappear from the equation for a while. Fawley in Hampshire, the UK’s biggest refinery, is due to shut for up to 10 weeks for planned maintenance. That would be awkward in calmer times. It is more awkward still when the average price of diesel has just broken the £2 mark for the first time.

According to the RAC, the average litre reached 200.01p on Friday. Simon Williams, the motoring body’s head of policy, said this was a threshold nobody wanted to cross and warned that prices were still rising. Motorists, naturally, were not offered much comfort beyond the usual promise that someone somewhere is taking the matter seriously.

The government has extended the 5p cut in fuel duty until the end of the year. Mather said the chancellor would decide the future of the measure at the budget and that ministers understood the pressure high prices are putting on households. The RAC has called for the freeze to run into spring. That is the sort of request that becomes more persuasive when the pump price is already doing the public relations damage for you.

Europe, meanwhile, is being pulled into the same mess. On Thursday, the UK opened talks with European allies over releasing emergency diesel supplies after the Trump administration told Germany and France to release their stockpiles to help ease soaring prices or face a US supply ban. On Friday, Dan Jørgensen, the EU commissioner for energy, said Europe was discussing the use of emergency diesel reserves with all members of the International Energy Agency, not just the US. He said the option had been used before and could be used again.

So the official line is that Britain is safe, supplied and resilient. Yet the country is leaning on foreign sources, reserve stocks, emergency diplomacy and a shrinking domestic refining base, all while prices climb. That may not amount to a shortage. It does, however, look like a system that is being asked to prove its strength at exactly the wrong moment.

Written by Martina Kirchner martina.kirchner@alpineweekly.com