Asia to suffer most from Iran war energy crisis, warns analytics firm
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The Philippine government is closely monitoring food prices as it goes into a national energy emergency.
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SINGAPORE – Asia faces the gravest fallout from the war on Iran and is confronting a major energy crisis, a global maritime analytics firm warned on March 31.
“We think Asia will, for now, be the ones suffering the most,” Kpler president Jean Maynier said at the company’s offices in Singapore.
He said the continent does not have enough energy resources of its own to cover the gap.
“It will not be enough in China. It will not be enough to cover in big countries like the Philippines or Indonesia. So it’s a real energy crisis,” he said.
Mr Maynier said the impact of Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz was already visible in countries like the Philippines, where the government has declared a national energy emergency.
“It’s really bad for Asia and we are not optimistic if the event continues,” he said.
“We hope at some point that politicians will find a solution.”
Brussels-based Kpler, which was founded in 2014 and owns the MarineTraffic website, is considered one of the foremost data analytics and ship-tracking agencies in the world.
It has been keeping a close eye on the Strait of Hormuz since the United States and Israel’s Feb 28 attack on Iran.
Seventeen commodities vessels crossed the strait over the weekend, 12 of them on March 28, making it one of the busiest days for crossings since March 1, according to Kpler.
As at March 31, commodities vessels had made just 196 crossings of the waterway in March, a huge decrease from before the war.
Of those, 120 were by oil tankers and gas carriers and most were travelling east out of the strait. AFP
