What if Europe's refineries shut down and leave it short of diesel?
A cascade of European refinery closures leaves the continent short of diesel and jet, structurally widening NWE diesel cracks and deepening import dependence on the US Gulf, Mideast and India; the trade is long European middle-distillate cracks over flat crude. Rhymes with the post-2020 European closure wave (Grangemouth, Wesseling) that lifted regional cracks and import reliance. Transmission: Europe pulls more from US/India/Mideast refiners; forward angle: with Russian diesel already designed out, fresh closures leave Europe acutely exposed to any single supplier outage.
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The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 6–18 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. A cascade of unprofitable European refinery shutdowns leaves the continent dangerously short of diesel and jet. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Diesel ▲ · European energy ▲ · Oil supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.