Former Japan trading house head warns of naphtha supply crunch
Japan is likely to face a shortage of naphtha-derived chemical products as early as the end of June, the former head of a major trading house said, in comments that contrast with the government’s view that supplies will last into next year.Fumiya Kokubu, a visiting fellow at The Institute of Energy Economics, Japan, said Monday it would be “impossible” to procure alternatives for the 15 million kiloliters of naphtha a year that the country sourced from the Middle East before the war in the region began nearly three months ago.“A massive supply source has disappeared,” the former president and chairman of Marubeni told a webinar. He added that it’s “not very realistic” to continue purchasing large volumes of naphtha from the U.S., one of the countries to which Japan has turned for alternative supplies, and that the issues run deeper than distribution bottlenecks previously cited by the government.
