Asia's diesel exports to Africa are surging to nearly five-year highs as Middle East sales to the continent crashed to nine-year lows amid threats to shipping and refinery outages, according to a Reuters analysis of ship-tracking data and volumes published on Monday.

Diesel is a critical fuel across much of Africa, where it powers not only trucks and transport fleets but also backup generators used by businesses and households in countries with unreliable electricity grids, making sustained import shortfalls a broad economic concern.

The Middle East conflict has made shipping fuels, including diesel, to East Africa challenging, with ongoing security threats to tankers in both the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. In addition, attacks by the Iran-aligned Houthis in Yemen on Saudi energy infrastructure have crippled supply from Saudi Arabia, which accounted for as much as 40% of Africa's diesel imports last year.

As a result, refiners in Asia are expected to have sent up to 15 million barrels of diesel to Africa in August — the highest volume in at least four and a half years, according to the data reviewed by Reuters.

Asian supplies are set to partially offset the loss of diesel exports from the Middle East to Africa, which are tracked to have crumbled to their lowest level in nearly nine years. The shift, however, reorients Africa's supply chain toward suppliers much farther away, since Asian cargoes must sail around the Cape of Good Hope or through longer routings to reach the continent's eastern coasts.

Before the war, Africa received around half of its diesel imports from the Middle East, the closest major fuel-exporting region to the African continent, especially its eastern coasts.

But this year, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the Houthi threat to Saudi shipments in the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, and the Houthi attack on Saudi Aramco's Jazan oil refinery on the Red Sea coast have sharply reduced the volume of diesel flowing freely to Africa.

The Jazan refinery, for example, did not send any diesel to Africa in August, compared to 163,000 tons shipped in July, according to data from Kpler cited by Reuters.

The East-West arbitrage remains wide open for Asian exports into Africa and is likely to stay open as China eases its fuel export restrictions and other Asian refiners increase run rates, analysts say. For markets, the indicators to watch going forward include the pace of Chinese quota allocations, Asian refinery run rates, and whether Middle East shipping routes and the Jazan refinery return to normal operations — any of which could reshape the flow of diesel to the continent again.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com