NEW YORK: Even with air travel surging ahead of the Christmas holiday in the US, demand for jet fuel is unlikely to fully recover anytime soon.
That’s still less than half of what it was at this time a year ago, which doesn’t bode well for a part of the oil barrel that will by most estimates be the last to recover. Traffic is “still about 63% less than last year,” Bloomberg Intelligence oil analyst Brett Gibbs said. “We don’t see demand materially recovering until the second half of 2021 at the earliest with mass vaccine availability.”
Still, refiners have managed to keep inventory from ballooning out of control by shifting jet fuel into diesel stockpiles, something Gibbs said is still going on. With help from those moves, US jet fuel stockpiles last week were at seasonal six-year lows, the Energy Information Administration said.