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Falling water levels
: The Rhine near Düsseldorf
Photo: IMAGO/Jochen Tack
The prolonged drought on the Rhine has resulted in water levels dropping sharply.
This is now having increasing consequences for shipping.
Large quantities of diesel and heating oil are normally imported into Germany via the Rhine, particularly from Rotterdam, Antwerp and Amsterdam.
"These imports are currently very limited. Normally, a Rhine barge can load around 3,000 tons per ship, but due to the low water it is currently only around 1,000 tons to Duisburg, for example," reports
Hagen Reiners
from the independent reporting agency Argus OMR to manager magazin.
The transport volumes are therefore even further reduced towards the south.
"In Kaub we have a kind of bottleneck, because that's where the Rhine is at its shallowest, only up to 750 tons can get through here," says the expert for the fuel market in Germany, "at the moment it's a big problem, especially for Switzerland, which is also served by ship from Rotterdam to Basel."
The last time there was such low water on the Rhine was in 2018. "In Kaub, the level is currently 70 centimeters, forecasts predict a further drop to 60 centimeters in the coming days," says Reiners.
But not only the falling freight volumes cause problems, other factors lead to rising prices, especially for heating oil and diesel.
Many industrial companies currently prefer to use oil instead of gas as an energy source
"The difficult supply via the Rhine reduces the supply, at the same time the demand for diesel from agriculture increases. The same applies to heating oil, since many industrial companies currently prefer to use heating oil as an energy source instead of the enormously expensive natural gas," says Reiners.
In addition, the failure of a large refinery in Schwechat in Austria will result in a further reduction in supply - probably for several months to come.
All of this has a strong impact on the price.
"In the wholesale trade in northern Germany, diesel from the refinery currently costs up to 20 cents per liter less than in southern Germany, which is enormous," says Reiners, who observes something unusual in this context: "This development even goes so far that mineral oil dealers already have their own tankers send through Germany."