The Cost of a Borderless Crisis

Translated by Benedetta Calice

The price of gasoline is the latest link in a chain that begins thousands of kilometers away from Italy. In these days, as the crisis in the Middle East continues to put pressure on energy markets, the cost of fuel has once again become one of the most visible manifestations of an international crisis. In Italy, on September 18th, the average price of self-service gasoline reached approximately 2.15 euros per liter, while diesel exceeded 2.29 euros, with additional surcharges on the highway network. Behind these numbers, however, there is not only the Italian market. There is a crisis that starts from the Middle East and reaches European gas stations. The question then becomes broader: who can intervene when the price of an essential good is altered by a geopolitical shock that no state is capable of controlling independently?

It is now clear that the Middle East crisis has extended beyond the countries directly involved. In the previous months, to contain the shock, Saudi Arabia adopted alternative solutions to guarantee the passage of crude oil, even if these were not able to replace the traffic transiting through the strait. In particular, a share of Saudi crude was transported through the East-West Pipeline, also known as Petroline, which connects the fields of the Eastern Province with the port of Yanbu, located on the Red Sea. From here, the oil can be loaded onto tankers and reach international markets without crossing Hormuz. After the initial peaks following the blockade of the strait, the increase in flows through alternative routes, along with other compensation measures, had helped mitigate the initial shock on the markets, but the recent attack by Iraqi militias on the Petroline has made the impromptu and partial nature of the bypass evident. When even alternative routes become vulnerable, the capacity to absorb the shock is drastically reduced.

A country does not necessarily have to depend exclusively on these supply chains to directly suffer the effects of the price increase: oil is, in fact, traded on a global market. If a significant part of the supply is removed from the market, the price of crude oil increases even for importers who buy from other suppliers. The energy crisis thus becomes an international issue to all intents and purposes.

The International Energy Agency, created in the 1970s precisely in response to oil shocks, represents one of the main coordination tools among consumer countries. Through the emergency stockpile system, the IEA can help temporarily increase the supply available on the market and mitigate the effects of a crisis. But stockpiles cannot solve a prolonged geopolitical crisis; they can only buy time.

Meanwhile, in Brussels the problem is turning into a political issue. The hypothesis of taxing excess profits is struggling to find a place on the European agenda. The Commission has in fact underlined that taxation remains primarily a national competence and has not currently presented a proposal for a common European tax. It is a contradiction that reveals the difficulty of the European response: the shock is global, the market is integrated, but many of the tools to protect consumers remain national.

And the issue does not stop at gasoline. A prolonged increase in the price of energy transfers to transport, industrial production, and goods prices, thereby fueling inflation while simultaneously slowing down growth. This is precisely one of the problems also highlighted by the European Central Bank: rising energy costs reduce households' disposable income and can weaken consumption and economic activity. Therefore, high fuel prices are much more than a price issue. It is a test of the international community's ability to react to a shock.

The crisis in the Middle East thus reopens a dilemma that Europe had tried to overcome: focusing on fossil fuels to guarantee supply security in the short term or accelerating the energy transition to reduce import dependence in the long term. The IEA recently recorded an upward revision of global coal demand forecasts for 2026: +1.2%, up to 8.94 billion tons, transforming a previous forecast of a slight decline into a growth forecast. The crisis thus seems to produce a more subtle effect: not a true reversal of the transition, but a slowing of its trajectory. Faced with the need to guarantee energy at sustainable prices, security of supply is once again competing with decarbonization objectives. If in the short term the crisis can favor the use of still-available fossil fuels, in the medium and long term it can produce the opposite effect: strengthening the push toward the energy transition. The crisis could thus transform the acceleration of the transition from a predominantly climate objective into an energy security instrument.

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