The world has drawn down nearly a billion barrels of oil from global inventories since the US-Israeli war on Iran disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, leaving the energy system with little spare cover, the head of Abu Dhabi’s state oil company said on Monday.
Sultan Al Jaber, chief executive of ADNOC, told the UAE’s ADIPEC conference that supply buffers have been eroded and that diesel stockpiles in some regions are at 35-year lows for this point in the season, while others face a liquefied natural gas supply gap of 600 billion cubic feet, the Daily Mirror reported, carrying Reuters reporting.
Diesel prices in many markets have reached record highs on wartime supply disruption, which Al Jaber said poses inflation and cost-of-living risks to governments and consumers.
“We need expanded strategic storage, larger stockpiles of products, and flexible refining capacity closer to consumer markets,” he said. “Infrastructure must be built before it is needed and enabled by advanced logistics.”
Freight is now a third of the cost of a barrel
The sharpest figure in the account is on logistics rather than crude. Shipping and logistics have risen to 30% of the cost of a barrel, from 5% before the war — a sixfold increase that falls on importing countries regardless of the headline crude price.
Brent is trading at around $110 a barrel, up roughly 50% from February, immediately before the war began. The International Energy Agency agreed last month to release more than 20 million barrels of diesel, along with any oil left from the record emergency reserves release it pledged in March.
Why this matters in Colombo
Sri Lanka imports effectively all of its refined fuel, so both halves of Al Jaber’s account — record diesel prices and a sixfold rise in freight — feed directly into domestic pump prices and the import bill.
The Ceylon Petroleum Corporation raised four fuel grades from midnight on 1 November, with Octane 95 petrol and Super Diesel each up Rs 15 a litre under the monthly pricing formula, which tracks import costs, exchange rates and taxes. Separately, the fuel import bill for the first nine months of 2026 rose 51.5% to about $4.5 billion. The strait itself remains contested: two crude tankers caught fire on mines in Hormuz at the weekend, and mediators are working on a plan to reopen it.
Not reported
The filing does not break the inventory drawdown down by region or by crude versus products, name the areas where diesel stocks are at 35-year lows, or identify which markets face the LNG gap. It gives no forecast for prices or for when buffers might be rebuilt, and carries no Sri Lankan content — the domestic context above is drawn from this desk’s own earlier reporting, not from the source.
Single verified source. This is a Reuters-originated wire report carried by the Daily Mirror. A corroboration search across the other verified Sri Lankan business outlets found no independent filing on Al Jaber’s ADIPEC remarks; a Daily FT article pairing Sri Lanka with ADNOC concerns a separate, earlier crude supply discussion and is not corroboration for this event.
