"You have a bearish crude oil market and a very bullish product markets, which is very strange," said Patrick Pouyanne, speaking Monday, August 24, 2026, at the ONS energy conference in Norway.
It's not hard to see what he means. London's benchmark crude contract is trading near $90 a barrel, far below where it spiked in the early days of the Middle East conflict. But the diesel that keeps trucks running?
That's a different story. The premium that diesel commands over crude has now grown as wide as anything seen in the past 15 years.
The reason comes down to a simple mismatch. Crude oil can still move through the Strait of Hormuz without much trouble, Pouyanne said. Refined products cannot.
Shell CEO Wael Sawan described a "triple threat" hitting refined fuel markets all at once: Russian refinery attacks, plus hazardous conditions for vessels in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea.
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Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian refineries have taken a real bite out of global fuel supply. That's a massive amount of diesel and gasoline that used to reach world markets and no longer does.
At the same time, shipping hazards in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea are keeping product tankers from moving fuel to where it's needed. Pouyanne laid out the math: a tanker able to carry 2 million barrels of crude can still pass through Hormuz, but doing so costs about $20 million. For smaller product tankers carrying gasoline or diesel, insurance and shipping costs have become so high that it doesn't make sense.
"So you don't have a single tanker of products moving out of Hormuz," he said.
Shell CEO said the company is doing what it can to keep product moving, but he was blunt about the near term. "We have a tough few months ahead of us and the focus needs to be on continuing to do what we can to be able to alleviate that pain for customers," he said.
This fuel shortage doesn't just stay on a trading screen. It shows up places where it hurts.
He said U.S. gasoline prices would stay above $4 a gallon, not falling to the level President Trump has pushed. If you're in America, that's the number to watch. If you're in Europe, the news is worse, with consumers set to take the bigger share of higher fuel costs.
In short, the energy market is caught between two forces that rarely pull in the same direction: crude oil itself is easy enough to find, but the fuel made from it is getting harder to get.
So $90 barrels are starting to look like a bargain. The gas station, though, tells another story, and that story is likely to stay expensive for a while.
The divide between crude and refined products is a reminder that energy prices are not set by one global number. Crude benchmarks show how easily oil can move through major waterways, while diesel and gasoline prices reflect refinery output, shipping lanes, and insurance costs. With Russian refineries offline and product tankers avoiding the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, the shortage is concentrated in the fuels that power trucks, cars, and industry. That is why diesel's premium over crude has widened to levels not seen in 15 years and why U.S. gasoline is expected to stay above $4 a gallon even as crude trades near $90.
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