US jet fuel imports surge as Nigeria's Dangote refinery pushes barrels west

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. jet fuel imports are set to hit a two-year high in March after Nigeria's Dangote refinery pushed barrels to North America, which should lower prices of the aviation fuel in the peak summer travel season, trade analysts and storage brokers said.

The shipments by the 650,000 barrels-per-day (bpd) Dangote refinery, Africa's largest, highlight its potential to reshape global fuel trading dynamics by creating a new swing supplier in the Atlantic Basin.

It has already shown signs of success in competing with European refiners on gasoline exports, and the jet fuel shipments to the United States could challenge domestic producers' economics in the largest fuel consuming nation.

Six vessels carrying about 1.7 million barrels of jet fuel from the Dangote refinery arrived at U.S. ports this month, data from ship-tracking service Kpler showed. Another vessel, Hafnia Andromeda, is set to arrive at the Everglades terminal on March 29 with a load of about 348,000 barrels of jet fuel, the data showed.

Total U.S. jet fuel imports so far in March stood at around 226,000 bpd, the most since February 2023, the data showed.

The Dangote refinery started production last January after years of construction delays, and ramped up to about 85% of capacity in early February, allowing it to sell more fuel to international markets.

Dangote is unlikely to be a regular jet fuel supplier to the U.S., but a maintenance-related shutdown of the Phillips 66 Bayway refinery in New Jersey helped open a rare arbitrage opportunity for flows from Nigeria to the U.S., Sparta Commodities analyst James Noel-Beswick said.

The window is likely to close soon or shrink significantly due to elevated U.S. inventories of the aviation fuel, Noel-Beswick added.

Demand to lease storage tanks for jet fuel in Houston and New York Harbor in April is averaging around 700,000 barrels on storage broker TankTiger's platform, five to six times the average monthly demand, TankTiger Chief Operating Officer Steven Barsamian said.

The surge in demand, partly due to the influx of supply from Nigeria, is likely to lower jet fuel prices in the U.S. ahead of peak summer travel season, Barsamian said.

Despite lower prices, air travel over the summer could be dampened by economic headwinds from a stock market selloff and waning consumer confidence, Sparta's Noel-Beswick said.

U.S. jet fuel stocks ended February at 45.2 million barrels, the highest for the month since 1999, data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration showed.

U.S. refiners' yield of jet fuel hit a record last year, reflecting stronger demand relative to other transportation fuels, the EIA said on Monday. The agency expects U.S. jet fuel consumption to touch a record in 2026.

(Reporting by Shariq Khan in New York; Editing by Nick Zieminski)