Five weeks after Trump announced that Putin would "immediately" supply diesel to the "American and Global Marketplace," we can now check the receipts.
The global marketplace did fine. The American one got nothing.
According to the FT, citing Kpler data, Russia shipped 271,000 barrels a day of diesel in October, double the 135,000 b/d it exported in September. The extra barrels went to Brazil, Turkey and elsewhere. Meanwhile, not a single cargo generated by the sanctions waiver has reached a US port, two US-bound tankers have changed course, and the last one is idling off the East Coast waiting for someone, anyone, to buy it.
Regular readers know we have been tracking the diesel crisis since March, and we were skeptical of the Trump-Putin deal from the moment it hit the tape on Oct 9, mostly because of the arithmetic. It turns out the arithmetic was the least of the deal's problems.
"A Deal For The World"
First, the numbers. Kpler's tally is backed by Energy Aspects, whose head of geopolitics Richard Bronze told the FT that Russian diesel exports rose from 120,000 b/d in September to 260,000 b/d in October. That sounds impressive until you see the comparison he offered: the five-year average for October is roughly 700,000 b/d. In other words, Russia doubled its exports to barely a third of a normal October
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