The Trump administration wants France and Germany to tap their emergency fuel stockpiles to help bring down global prices, or face a US diesel export ban, according to three sources familiar with the talks cited by Reuters. A second source, speaking from Europe, put a number on it: the US wants 120 million barrels of diesel released across the EU over the next six months.
France and Germany between them hold more than a third of the EU’s strategic diesel reserves — Germany 5.6 million tonnes and France 8.2 million tonnes, against roughly 39 million tonnes held bloc-wide. EU rules require members to hold at least 90 days of net imports or 61 days of consumption, whichever is larger.
US officials have said for months that France and Germany never fully honored past pledges to release reserves during earlier shortages. One source, a US official, put the latest ask in cooperative terms: it was “in Europe’s best interest to work with the United States” toward cheaper fuel.
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Energy Secretary Chris Wright signaled Washington wants a public answer soon, framing the squeeze as the product of overlapping shocks rather than any single cause. “We’ve lost some diesel exports from the Middle East, although we’re restoring those, and we’ve lost diesel exports from China. So that’s a lot of interruptions.”
Berlin’s economy ministry left Reuters’ request for comment unanswered, and Paris’s energy ministry had no comment at all. One substantive answer did come from the Élysée, where an official said the topic never actually came up when Macron and Trump crossed paths at last week’s UN General Assembly, but that Macron intends to pull G7 leaders into a video call over fuel prices, coordinating any reserve release through the IEA rather than acting alone.
Europe turned to American diesel after cutting off Russian imports over the Ukraine invasion and losing Middle Eastern barrels to the Iran war, building reliance on the US as a hedge against Russian leverage. RUSI argues that the same reliance now cuts the other way, leaving Europe especially exposed if Washington actually follows through on the ban.
A ban would also cut against the US’s own oil industry, which supplies roughly 20% of global diesel exports. Analysts counter that a ban would cause refiners to scale back runs, tightening gasoline and jet fuel too, and likely raising prices everywhere, including in the US.
Related: Energy Industry, Including Trump’s Usual Allies, Urges Him Against A Diesel Export Ban
American Petroleum Institute CEO Mike Sommers has warned restricting exports “would hit an already-tight market with another supply shock,” and the API has separately called the likely fallout “catastrophic.” GasBuddy’s Patrick De Haan put the risk more bluntly: “the cure would be far worse than the disease.”
Also read: Goldman Sachs Models What A US Diesel Export Ban Would Actually Cost
The push is tied to the November midterms, with farm-state Republicans facing record diesel costs during harvest season.
