17JUN

Saudi Red Sea diesel loadings collapse

3 min read

10:21UTC

Saudi Red Sea diesel loadings fell to roughly 100,000 tonnes since 27 July from about 600,000 the week before, and Turkey turned net importer of European diesel for the first time since November 2022.

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Key takeaway

Saudi Red Sea loadings collapsed and Turkey turned importer, tightening Mediterranean feedstock and product on one corridor.

Saudi Red Sea diesel loadings fell to roughly 100,000 tonnes since 27 July, against about 600,000 tonnes the week before, and Turkey flipped to a net importer of European diesel for the first time since November 2022, per Argus Media⁠¹. Turkey normally runs the other way, pushing surplus barrels from its Aegean and Mediterranean refineries into southern Europe. A country that supplies the basin turning round to draw from it removes the region's nearest replacement cargo at the moment it is needed.

Mediterranean refiners take 24% of their imported diesel through Saudi Red Sea ports, against 17% for Northwest Europe⁠². That import share explains why the pricing separation shows up in the Med rather than at ARA, and it lands twice over: the same corridor carries the crude feedstock those refineries run and the finished cargoes they backfill with, so a disruption tightens both legs in the same week rather than in sequence.

The corridor itself has a measured floor. Tanker transits through Bab el-Mandeb have settled near 7.5 a day for Saudi-linked hulls, down from about 12 in the days between the 20 July blockade declaration and the withdrawal of Lloyd's-market war-risk cover on 24 July, with total crossings down 22% to 37.2 a day⁠³. This desk logged that transit figure on 30 July, and 7.5 is a floor rather than a waypoint, set by the insurance mechanics rather than by the shooting.

War-risk cover and a war-risk rate are different instruments with different reversal speeds, which is why the floor holds. A rate priced at some percentage of hull value can be argued back down inside a week once the loss record cools. A withdrawal removes the contract for a defined class of vessel, and an underwriting committee has to re-accept that class before an owner will sail it, which is a process with a lead time no diplomatic headline shortens. Freight was tightening ahead of the exclusion rather than because of it: cross-Mediterranean aframax rates had already spiked 198% month-on-month to $151,308 a day. A charterer without an existing placement is now facing a capacity market rather than a price market.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Saudi Arabia normally ships a lot of diesel to Europe through the Red Sea, but the tonnage it sent in the week after 27 July collapsed to a sixth of the previous week's level. At the same time, Turkey, a country that usually sells diesel to Europe, had to start buying it instead, for the first time since 2022. Both point the same way: fewer tankers are willing to use the Red Sea corridor right now, so cargoes that would normally flow through it are not moving, and countries that relied on that supply are having to look elsewhere.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

Lloyd's market underwriting committees do not restore war-risk cover for a withdrawn hull class the moment a threat recedes; a class gets pulled after an incident, or a credible warning, and re-accepting it requires the committee to see a sustained calm period.

That restoration typically lags any de-escalation by weeks, not days, which is the mechanical reason a single called-off strike, as in this desk's earlier item, does not immediately restore Red Sea tanker flows even if the underlying threat has genuinely passed.

What could happen next?

Risk
If Saudi Red Sea loadings do not recover within a few weeks, expect further Mediterranean refiners to follow Turkey in flipping from net exporter to net importer of diesel, deepening the regional supply gap.

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources from United Kingdom

United Kingdom

Primary parallel: The 2024 Red Sea diversions around the Bab el-Mandeb corridor showed the same mechanism at scale: once a critical mass of owners judged the risk-adjusted cost of transit too high, cargoes rerouted around Africa for months, permanently altering freight economics on affected routes even after individual incidents stopped.

Counter-parallel: The 2024 diversions were a full rerouting around the Cape of Good Hope adding weeks to voyage time. Saudi Arabia's collapse in Red Sea loadings looks more like withheld supply than rerouted supply, since the alternative to the corridor for these cargoes is not an alternative route but no cargo reaching the Mediterranean at all.

Consensus view: The Saudi Red Sea loadings collapse reads as owners routing tonnage around the corridor entirely rather than paying escalating war-risk premiums to transit it, a rational response once cover for a given hull class becomes hard to source at any price.

Counter-view: The competing read, which this desk cannot yet test, is whether Turkey's flip to net importer reflects domestic refinery scheduling rather than corridor avoidance. No first-party statement from Turkish maritime officials was obtained either way, and a single month's trade balance should not yet be read as a structural reversal.

Key tension: Whether Turkey's import flip is a durable consequence of Red Sea avoidance or a scheduling-driven blip that will reverse once refinery runs normalise.

Sources:Argus Media

Mentions:Saudi Arabia →Turkey →Bab al-Mandeb →Mediterranean →Argus Media →Cape of Good Hope →Red Sea →ARA →Lloyd's of London →

First Reported In

Update #22 · The premium unwinds; the diesel crack does not

Argus Media· 3 Aug 2026

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Causes and effects

Caused by

Med aframax freight doubles in a week

Freight already tightening before the loadings collapse compounds the corridor squeeze

Occurred 20 Jul 2026

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Bab el-Mandeb thins to 7.5 tankers a day

The Bab el-Mandeb transit floor this desk logged 30 July strands the same Red Sea cargoes

Occurred 29 Jul 2026

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This Event

Saudi Red Sea diesel loadings collapse

Mediterranean refiners lose imported product and Red Sea feedstock on the same corridor at once, and the reversed Turkish trade direction removes the region's usual local backfill.

Led to

Med diesel crack assessed at $91.67

The Saudi Red Sea loadings collapse feeds the Med crack that Argus assessed at a record

Occurred 29 Jul 2026

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Different Perspectives

French Football Federation

The FFF called an 11:00 CEST press conference for 28 July, at its Paris headquarters, following an extraordinary executive committee meeting, at which Zinedine Zidane is expected to be presented as head coach succeeding Didier Deschamps. As of this writing no communique confirms the appointment, contract length or start date.

Morocco

Morocco is pushing for the 2030 final at its Grand Stade Hassan II in Casablanca, a planned 115,000-seat venue that would be the world's largest football stadium on completion. The venue is contested by a Spanish petition for the Santiago Bernabeu, and FIFA has fixed neither the venue nor the tournament's proposed 64-team format.

FIFA

FIFA's first tournament report, published 27 July, itemises nearly 300,000 accredited personnel, 73,700 security staff and 300,000 square metres of custom-grown turf, with no revenue or cost figure attached. As a Swiss association answering to its own Congress rather than a treasury, FIFA has followed the same operational-before-financial sequence it used after Qatar 2022.

Javier Tebas / La Liga

La Liga president Javier Tebas said on 21 July that FIFA's system is rotten from the root and that Gianni Infantino's time as president has, in his words, concluded. Tebas has no vote in FIFA's process, so days after the IOC declined jurisdiction over a separate ethics complaint, he used the only instrument he has.

Mexico City government

Head of government Clara Brugada presented a closing report on 22 July crediting the tournament with 44 billion pesos of economic activity, 2,000-plus accelerated public works and 100,000 formal jobs in June alone. The city has not published the method behind that figure, and three other Mexican bodies count the same five weeks differently.

Town of Foxborough

Foxborough answered Kraft Group's June lawsuit on 7 July with a 61-page counterclaim, calling the stadium's owners 'a collection of multibillion-dollar corporations' trying to shift its $7.8 million security bill onto taxpayers. The town says its licensing power and its billing power run through the same board, and it wants the court to award its own costs too.