Not even Christmas can save a battered market for US jet fuel
Even with air travel surging ahead of the Christmas holiday in the US, demand for jet fuel is unlikely to fully recover anytime soon.
Foot traffic through airports last weekend topped 1 million people a day for three straight days — something that hadn’t happened since March before the coronavirus shut the nation down. That’s still less than half of what it was at this time a year ago, which doesn’t bode well for a part of the oil barrel that will by most estimates will be the last to recover.
The spread between the price of jet fuel and crude oil, a rough gauge of how much a refinery can make for producing it, rose to $8 a barrel. It’s the highest since the pandemic forced most flights to be grounded but far below the roughly $21 margin a year ago.
