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\u2019s view that supplies will last into next year.<\/p>\n
Fumiya Kokubu, a visiting fellow at The Institute of Energy Economics, Japan, said Monday it would be \u201cimpossible\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cA massive supply source has disappeared,\u201d the former president and chairman of Marubeni told a webinar. He added that it\u2019s \u201cnot very realistic\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
Kokubu was not specific about conditions that might lead to the predicted shortage, including whether his forecast would change in the event of a resolution to the conflict and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.<\/p>\n
Since the war began, the Japanese government has said repeatedly that the country has enough supplies of fuel and petrochemical products. Unlike some of its Asian neighbors, the nation has refrained from asking households and businesses to curb energy use, although nearly three-quarters of the public called for energy-saving in a recent poll.<\/p>\n
Japan has been tapping into its vast strategic oil reserve, and the government has also said it secured fuel from regions outside the Middle East. The Japan Petrochemical Industry Association said last week that imports of naphtha from beyond the region \u2014 including the U.S. \u2014 could reach around 1.4 million kiloliters in May.<\/p>\n
That would be a threefold increase from pre-war levels, potentially offsetting lost supply from the Persian Gulf region, the industry lobby group\u2019s managing director, Katsuya Shimura, said at a news conference Thursday.<\/p>\n
Still, several Japanese firms have responded to the supply disruptions by modifying output that involves naphtha-derived products. Calbee, the country\u2019s biggest potato-chip maker, is using just two colors on its packaging due to an ink shortage, while toilet and household materials manufacturer Toto briefly suspended orders for its prefabricated plastic baths.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Japan is likely to face a shortage of naphtha-derived chemical products as early as the end of June,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":43150,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175],"tags":[217,215,1739,14,214,216,190,449,5643,1957,1714],"class_list":["post-43149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-business-of-japan","tag-economic-security","tag-iran","tag-japans-business","tag-japanese-business","tag-japanese-economy","tag-middle-east","tag-naphtha","tag-supply-chains","tag-trade"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43149"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43149\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}