Diesel scarcity takes its toll
In many European countries, diesel is now more expensive than petrol. The Netherlands is one of ten countries where petrol is even more expensive than diesel, but petrol is currently the cheaper fuel in seventeen EU countries. The rapidly rising diesel price is the result of declining supplies from Russia to the West.
The maximum price of a liter of diesel in Belgium is rising almost as fast as the last 17.5 cent reduction in excise duty. The federal public service Economy reports that the Belgian diesel price will increase by 17.4 cents to €2,078 euros on Thursday. In Germany, too, diesel is now more expensive than petrol for the first time in at least fifteen years, in France this was only the case at the end of 2018 in the past decade. Petrol is now the cheaper fuel in 17 EU countries, compared to only 9 Member States on 28 February.
In the Netherlands, the average recommended retail price of diesel is now €2,284 per liter according to consumer collective UnitedConsumers. This makes our country one of the ten countries where a liter of diesel is still cheaper than a liter of petrol. The average suggested retail price of a liter of Euro 95 (E10) here is €2.436. That price difference will be smaller with the excise duty reduction on 1 April. The excise duty on diesel will then be reduced by 11 cents and on petrol by 17 cents. That would mean that the current price difference of 15 cents will already be reduced to 9 cents, regardless of what the prices of the fuels on the market are doing.
So it could well be that diesel will soon become more expensive than petrol in our country for the first time. There is a good chance that the price of diesel will rise faster than that of petrol due to a decline in the supply of diesel from Russia. This threatens to lead to a greater shortage of diesel.
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl