Six months into the Hormuz crisis, global fossil fuel importers have paid USD 330 billion above expected prices, with India’s additional bill reaching USD 22.5 billion.

EdPublica Data Desk   |   Analysis

Since the United States and Israel struck Iran on 28 February 2026 and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz collapsed, countries that import oil and gas by sea have paid more than USD 330 billion above what markets had expected to charge them, according to new research published by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA). That works out to roughly USD 55 billion extra every month for half a year — the largest sustained fossil fuel price shock since the 1990 Gulf War, and one that is still running.

Hormuz crisis drives global fuel costs higher

India’s share of that bill is USD 22.5 billion, the second-highest of any country in the world, behind only China’s USD 35.5 billion and ahead of the United States, despite America being the world’s largest oil producer. That ranking is a direct consequence of how much of its energy India buys from abroad: the country imports close to 90 percent of the crude oil it uses, more than almost any other major economy, which leaves it with limited room to absorb a shock at the source.

India paid the second-highest fossil fuel import premium of any country over the six months to August 2026, behind only China.  Source: CREA analysis. Illustration: EdPublica

A shock rivalled only by the 1990 Gulf War

CREA’s estimate is built from actual, ship-tracked cargo data — sourced from Kpler — for crude oil, refined fuels and gas that moved by sea between March and August 2026, compared against the futures prices the market had already set for those same delivery months in the twelve days before the strikes. Because both sides of the comparison are settlements of the same contract, the gap is a direct, like-for-like price difference rather than a modelled estimate. The analysis covers 170 countries and deliberately excludes pipeline gas, coal, fuel oil, naphtha, freight and war-risk insurance, all of which would push the true cost higher. CREA describes its USD 330 billion figure as conservative on that basis.

Brent crude’s trajectory over the six months traced a path familiar from past oil shocks: a sharp spike in the first weeks, a partial retreat, and a second surge later on. Prices briefly touched pre-war levels in late June before climbing back above USD 100 a barrel in late July, a pattern CREA’s researchers compared directly against the 1990 Gulf War, the 2019 Abqaiq attack and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Of those four episodes, only the Gulf War produced a larger and longer-lasting price premium than the current crisis.

Refined fuels rose faster than crude itself

Crude oil accounts for the largest single share of the extra cost, USD 164 billion, at an average premium of 35 percent over pre-war expectations. But the fuels people and businesses actually use day to day rose by a steeper proportion still. Diesel and gasoil were up 59 percent, adding USD 74 billion; gasoline rose 43 percent, adding USD 36 billion; jet fuel rose 59 percent, adding USD 20 billion; and LNG rose 60 percent in the Atlantic basin and 75 percent in the Pacific, adding USD 38 billion.

Refined fuels — diesel and gasoil in particular — rose by a steeper margin than crude oil itself.  Source: CREA analysis. Illustration: EdPublica

Diesel’s premium mattered more than any other single figure in the analysis, because of how widely it is used. Industry, freight and farming all run substantially on diesel, so its price feeds directly into the cost of nearly everything else. Of the 170 countries CREA analysed, 134 paid more for diesel than their pre-war futures had implied. The war premium for diesel stayed above 55 percent in five of the six months, dipping to 43 percent in June before climbing back to 65 percent by August. Even the United States, the world’s largest oil producer, was not insulated: the average price of a gallon of diesel rose to USD 5.57 in the week of 17 August, the highest level since 2022 and closing in on that year’s record, according to AAA.

The clean energy dividend

The research’s central finding on mitigation is that a country’s exposure to the shock has been shaped less by geography than by how much of its power already comes from clean sources. Clean power capacity added since 2020 saved importing countries an estimated USD 36 billion in avoided coal, gas and oil imports in the first five months of the crisis alone. Of that, USD 10.6 billion existed only because of the war itself: every unit of coal or gas a country did not need to buy was a unit it did not have to purchase at inflated wartime prices, on top of whatever it would ordinarily have saved.

“The energy transition is an investment,” Wickenden added, “so the best day to have started is yesterday.” Electrification is compounding the effect: the world’s electric vehicle fleet is on course to displace around five million barrels of oil a day by 2030, roughly comparable to the volume of crude Saudi Arabia currently moves through its East-West Yanbu pipeline specifically to bypass the Strait of Hormuz, according to the International Energy Agency’s Global EV Outlook.

Poorer countries are absorbing a bigger hit

The burden of the crisis has fallen unevenly by income, not just by geography. Low- and lower-middle-income countries paid an additional 1.0 percent of their 2024 GDP in higher fossil fuel costs, more than twice the 0.45 percent burden faced by high-income countries.

India’s particular exposure

India’s position in the top three is not simply a function of the size of its economy. The country entered 2026 already navigating a difficult trade-off on energy: after Washington imposed additional tariffs on Indian exports over New Delhi’s imports of discounted Russian crude, India had been cutting back on Russian oil and increasing purchases from the Middle East in pursuit of a US trade deal. The Hormuz crisis disrupted that shift almost immediately, cutting off much of the Middle Eastern supply India had been leaning on and pushing it back toward Russian crude even as prices climbed and a separate US sanctions waiver on Russian oil purchases lapsed in April.

By June, India’s total crude imports had hit a monthly record of roughly five million barrels a day, with Russian supplies alone reaching an unprecedented 2.6 million barrels a day — 54 percent of the country’s total crude imports, and more than double the volume seen in February. That pivot briefly inverted the usual arithmetic: discounted Urals crude, which had traded well below Brent since 2022, began trading at a premium to it in March, as Indian and Chinese refiners competed for the limited Russian cargoes still reaching them outside the Gulf. By July, as Gulf supply chains began to normalise, Urals discounts had reopened to more than USD 10 a barrel below Brent.

Russian crude functioned, in effect, as India’s insurance policy against a disruption its strategic reserves were not large enough to absorb on their own — but insurance still has a premium, and India’s USD 22.5 billion bill is a measure of how much of that premium it ultimately paid, on top of what it saved through the Russian discount.

From a motorcycle and first-aid kit in 2019, Manali Strays has grown into a 15-person animal rescue operation serving stray animals across the Kullu valley.

Manali draws visitors from across the world for its snow-line, its apple orchards and its rivers. What most of them never see is what happens to the town’s street dogs once the tourist season empties out, or what it takes to treat an animal with no owner and nowhere to go when it is injured.

Manali Strays: Building Animal Rescue Services in the Himalayas

That gap is what Manali Strays was built to close. The organisation was founded on World Rabies Day — 28 September — in 2019, by four people who had each, in different ways, run up against the same problem: there was no veterinary infrastructure in the Kullu valley for animals that belonged to no one. Kamlesh, an Indian animal welfare worker with a diploma in veterinary sciences, had spent years handling rescue cases from Manali and its surrounding villages for another organisation and had seen how little could be done for them locally. Becky, a British national who visited Manali often, shared his concern. They were joined by Irma, a German national who had also spent time in Manali and had been trying to bring together people willing to set up a rescue, and by Buddhi Ram, a local resident. Together the four registered Manali Strays as a charitable trust in India in January 2020; a UK-registered arm followed a few months later to support fundraising and awareness abroad. The organisation is recognised by the Animal Welfare Board of India and holds 80G tax-exemption status, and describes itself as the first dedicated animal rescue operation in the Kullu district.

The work began in Haripur village, just outside Manali, with almost nothing but a motorcycle and a first-aid kit. Kamlesh would ride out to wherever a call came in — a dog hit on the road, an animal too weak to move — and treat it on the spot, because there was no facility to bring it back to. A helpline set up in the early days took two to five calls a day at first. It now takes 50 to 60, according to the organisation, a rough measure of how far word has spread and how much the service is now relied on.

The pandemic tested the operation almost as soon as it began. Manali’s street dogs survive largely on food discarded by hotels and restaurants, and when tourism shut down in 2020, that food source disappeared within weeks. Kamlesh’s team responded by running organised feeding drives across the town, alongside the rescue and treatment work they were already doing — and it was around this period that the need for a permanent facility became impossible to ignore. The trust leased land in Haripur and built a treatment centre where injured animals could be vaccinated, treated and held for recovery.

Six years on, that centre has grown into a proper veterinary facility, with a recovery shelter, an X-ray unit and a functioning operating theatre for sterilisation surgeries and other procedures. Three ambulances now run out of it, reaching animals in villages that would otherwise have no access to care at all. The team itself has grown from two founders to around 15 staff. According to the organisation, it has vaccinated more than 9,000 animals to date and sterilised more than 5,000 stray dogs — the latter figure central to keeping the street dog population in check without resorting to culling.

Himachal Pradesh’s monsoon floods, in 2023 and again in 2025, disrupted the region and its communities severely; the organisation says its rescue and treatment work continued through both.

Beyond Manali itself, the trust runs vaccination drives, sterilisation camps and rescue missions in villages further into the mountains that have no veterinary access of their own, and it runs an adoption programme for rescued dogs once they are treated, vaccinated and sterilised. It has also become a training ground for veterinary students: through a partnership with the Indian Veterinary Students’ Association, students travel to Manali for placements at the centre, working alongside the resident team on live rescue and surgical cases.

What began as one man on a motorcycle carrying bandages has become, over six years, an operation that a stray dog anywhere in the Kullu valley now stands a real chance of being reached by.

At the Tiruppur Knit Show, decarbonisation took centre stage as textile exporters confronted CBAM, DPP, clean energy and global market pressures.

Tiruppur, Tamil Nadu, India: The Knit Show has run in Tiruppur, India’s textile hub, since 2000, and its script rarely changes: rows of machinery, dye and chemical stalls, garment accessory vendors, buying agents working the floor at the Toplight Trade Center. This year — 21 to 23 August — the show drew its usual crowd, showcasing new machinery and advanced digital printing technology, the kind of incremental modernisation a 25-year-old trade fair reports on every edition.

But running alongside it this year was something the Knit Show doesn’t usually host: a two-day conference titled “Decarbonising the Textile Supply Chain,” which included a workshop and panel discussions, organised by Auroville Consulting in partnership with the Tiruppur Exporters’ Association (TEA), SIDBI, Guidance Tamil Nadu, MCCI, and the UK High Commission — built specifically for media professionals covering Tamil Nadu’s textile and export sector.

Tiruppur Knit Show turns spotlight on textile decarbonisation

That a trade show built around machinery and commerce now carries a parallel track built around carbon compliance and climate finance is, in some ways, the story. Tiruppur accounts for roughly 90 percent of India’s cotton knitwear exports and, by workshop participants’ count, is home to 2,500 exporters and 25,000 standalone units. Decarbonisation, until recently, was a compliance conversation, not a competitive one. This year, at least in this room, that seemed to be shifting — driven less by domestic regulation than by external pressure: the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) and Digital Product Passport (DPP) requirements, which are steadily raising the bar for market access into Europe.

Compliance as the opening argument

The first panel — moderated by Saraswathi, Secretary-General of MCCI — set the terms early: CBAM and DPP are no longer abstractions for Tiruppur’s exporters, but live conditions for keeping a buyer.

N. Thirukkumaran of ESSTEE Exports India framed compliance as a collective, ongoing discipline rather than a one-time fix. “It should not be something done only once; it has to be a continuous process,” he said, adding that Tiruppur’s companies aren’t competing against one another on this front so much as collectively meeting the bar buyers now demand.

He also pushed back on the idea that Tiruppur is only playing defence on emissions. Referencing EU reporting requirements he referred to as SEPA, Thirukkumaran argued the cluster already outperforms what’s being asked of it: Tiruppur, as a district, produces roughly 1,950 megawatts of renewable energy against a consumption of about 360 megawatts — a substantial surplus. On pollution specifically, he said 98 percent of Tiruppur’s dyeing units are now classified non-hazardous, and that the cluster follows zero liquid discharge “religiously.”

The technology pitch

The second panel turned to the shop floor: efficient utilities, clean power, low-carbon process heat, and EV logistics. It was moderated by Ramesh Matham, Consulting Editor at The Hindu BusinessLine, alongside Sujith Thomas of the UK High Commission, Martin Scherfler of Auroville Consulting, and Manikandan of Aspiration Cleantech Ventures.

Scherfler’s pitch centred on many topics including electrification. Industrial heat demand — the energy-intensive business of heating water and process fluids — has traditionally run on fossil fuels, he said, but that heat “can be replaced by electricity as a fuel.” The same logic, he pointed out, is already familiar to most people from their own lives: the shift from a petrol scooter to an electric one is electrification too.

He argued electrification carries a double advantage: electric processes are typically more efficient than their fossil-fuel equivalents, and because wind and solar are now the cheapest sources of electricity available, pairing electrification with clean power multiplies the emissions cut across a facility’s transport and heating load at once. Scherfler called it “not the silver bullet,” but estimated it could address roughly 70 to 80 percent of an industry’s total emissions.

Financing the transition

A third panel, moderated by Karunamayi of Auroville Consulting, turned to the money behind the shift — climate-linked finance instruments, government schemes, and the institutional support needed to de-risk early adoption for smaller units, with SIDBI’s Ramachandran, TEA Joint Secretary and Eastern Global Clothing CEO Kumar Duraiswamy, and Dyers Association Treasurer Madheswaran on the panel.

On the ground

The conference’s second day moved from panel discussion to the shop floor, with visits arranged to a dyeing unit at Jeyavishnu Clothing, the Veerapandi Common Effluent Treatment Plant, and the exporter floor at Esstee Exports India — structured to let visiting journalists see the compliance and technology conversation from the previous day translated into plant-level practice.

Why this belongs at a trade show

That a decarbonisation conference found a home inside a machinery trade fair, rather than staying confined to policy seminars or NGO reports, is itself worth noting. It suggests Tiruppur’s industry is beginning to treat emissions and compliance as commercially load-bearing — tied directly to buyer retention and market access — rather than only a regulatory box to tick. Whether that shift holds up under scrutiny, beyond the room in which it was pitched, is the question worth returning to.