Oct 1, 4:01 PM
Washington Turns Europe’s Diesel Stocks into a Bargaining Chip
The United States is pressing Germany and France to open their reserve tanks, while dangling an export ban over its own diesel shipments.
Washington has found a new use for Europe’s emergency fuel stocks: leverage. According to Reuters, citing three people familiar with the talks, the US government is pressing Germany and France to release diesel from their strategic reserves, and is weighing an export ban on American diesel if Germany does not comply.
The scale of the request is not modest, which is usually a clue that politics has entered the room. A European source told Reuters that Washington wants the European Union to put 120 million barrels of diesel on the market within six months. That would amount to more than 40 percent of the EU’s diesel and gasoil emergency reserves. Germany and France sit on a large share of that cushion. Eurostat data from May 2025 showed Germany with 5.6 million tonnes and France with 8.2 million tonnes, together roughly 35 percent of the bloc’s reserves.
Berlin is hardly starting from zero. The German federal government already released part of its emergency stocks this year after the International Energy Agency called on member states in March to coordinate a release of oil reserves. Germany’s share of that move was 2.6 million tonnes. In the first tranche, the government let out 400,000 tonnes of crude oil, 150,000 tonnes of diesel and 50,000 tonnes of kerosene. Its total emergency reserve, according to the government, stands at around 20 million tonnes of crude oil and oil products. Only last week, Berlin said no further release was currently needed.
That position now looks rather less comfortable. Since Thursday, Germany has also brought back the so-called tank rebate, cutting the energy tax on petrol and diesel by 14.04 cents per litre. Including value-added tax, that translates into a relief of about 17 cents per litre. The measure runs until 31 December. Germany had already used the same temporary tax cut in May and June.
The episode says less about energy policy in the abstract than about the habit of treating strategic reserves as a convenient spare part. Governments like to call them insurance, until the bill arrives and someone else wants the policy paid out. If Washington follows through on the threat, Europe will discover once again that emergency stocks are only emergency stocks until they become bargaining chips.
Written by Thomas Nussbaumer thomas.nussbaumer@alpineweekly.com
