If the war in the Middle East drags out more than six months, economies around the world would suffer “real impacts”, the head of French oil giant TotalEnergies said on Sunday.
“If it’s more than six months, we will have some real impacts. All the economies of the world will be damaged,” CEO Patrick Pouyanne said in an interview with Chinese state broadcaster CGTN.
Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for US-Israeli strikes against it has severely crimped the world’s oil supply and raised fears among governments of higher inflation and lower economic growth.
Pouyanne noted that, in peacetime, around 20 percent of global oil production passes through the strait, but with “what is stuck today, you have 10 million barrels of oil per day which cannot exit” the Gulf.
“And we cannot find the oil elsewhere in the planet,” said the energy boss, who was interviewed on the sidelines of the China Development Forum in Beijing.
“If this conflict lasts three, four months, we can swallow it. Today we manage to amortise this shock because we have inventories,” he said.
But, he warned, a prolonged conflict going beyond six months would be a blow to the global economy.
“So again, I hope we’ll find solutions quickly for this war,” he said.
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