Apparently there is a shortage of ground lamb due to market shifts (more people buying it) and a reduction in exports from AU and NZ. Flocks in the US are down (I didn't dive into causation for that).

Here is my story. I'm in Annapolis MD. Ground lamb was readily available at Giant Food (regional chain), Safeway, and Aldi as well as more expensive places. Last year it was $5/lb. Then Giant and Safeway dropped it. Not out of stock. Dropped it. Aldi still carried it at $6/lb (Aldi as cheapest is marketing hype - I always check them and lots of places but Aldi rarely turns out to be cheapest. Aldi has now dropped ground lamb as well. We can get ground lamb at Whole Foods and Fresh Market for $15/lb. We'll do without.

My wife went to NJ to spend several days with her father (90). I cast a wider net along her route home. ShopRite in NJ has it for $9.50/lb. Acme in DE for $11/lb. Food Lion in DE and MD have it for $9/lb. Fortunately the Food Lion in the town where my wife stopped for lunch had it in stock. We bought their last three. It's a little expensive but no more than what we pay for tuna and salmon at Sam's Club. We'll just freeze it for special dinners.

We've seen market shifts affect price before on chicken thighs, chicken wings, brisket, and oxtail. Changes in exports from other countries (imports to the US) definitely leads to out of stock.

Been noticing recently that samplers and customers are seeing a lot of low or no stocks. Not sure if its incompetence of the managers or whats going on ? Not seen anything on the news about shortages. But then again that would start panic buying.

The map shrank, not grew.

• Cambodia — I had this as an active shortage on the March station closures (~2,000 of 6,300 stations shut). Re-checking, the March record itself shows only ~400 still closed within days as the rest reopened. Nothing newer since March 23. Downgraded.
• Italy airport jet fuel — the Air BP rationing NOTAMs at 7 airports. Last confirmation mid-May, and the reporting then said Italy managed it without major disruption. Removed.
• EU systemic jet fuel shortage — ACI Europe's warning that 100+ airports would hit a systemic shortage within three weeks. That deadline came and went in April. The European Commission said in May there were no EU shortages. Removed.

Net: 31 tracked shortages down to 29. The diesel-gets-harder call in my July post did not play out the way I framed it in the aviation-fuel space specifically. Worth saying plainly.

What's still real and getting worse: the US strategic buffer.

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve dropped below 300 million barrels — 298.7M as of Aug 12 (DOE), down 6.1M on the week. First time under 300M since January 1983.

Important caveats, because this number gets misreported constantly:

• The reserve's safe operating minimum is around 70M barrels per DOE. There's a separate 252.4M statutory threshold that restricts certain drawdowns. Neither is near.
• It's structured as an exchange, not a sale — from a 172M-barrel release in March. Companies borrow the crude and must return it plus a premium.
• Commercial (non-strategic) crude went the opposite direction the same week: a surprise 17.4M barrel build, biggest since January 2023.

So: strategic reserve at a 43-year low, commercial inventories posting their largest build in three and a half years, simultaneously.

Availability, since that's what this sub cares about:

No physical rationing in the US. Every station has fuel. AAA national average ~$4.07/gal and remarkably flat for weeks despite crude swinging hard. The mechanism is price rationing, not allocation.

Still-active shortages worth knowing about: Russia (78 of 83 regions showing disruption signal, export bans extended), Cuba, Nepal (LPG), South Sudan, Libya, Myanmar/Laos, Kyrgyzstan/Tajikistan.

One genuinely unresolved thing: there's a large discrepancy in how much oil is actually moving through Hormuz. The US Energy Secretary says a 9M bpd seven-day average. Barclays estimated ~3M bpd for the week ending Aug 7.

Sources: DOE, EIA, AAA, CNBC, Barclays. Full tracker at https://global-energy-flow.com/

I know, strange title. I’ve got a bearded dragon and my little fella loves his crickets. I went to Petco to restock and I was told nationally they haven’t been able to obtain crickets. Their regular vendor lost their entire colony, leaving Petco with little time to find a replacement. Since the crickets are impossible to stock for the time being, the cashier stated it’s been difficult to maintain other live insect feeders in stock, leading to local shortages of mealworms, super worms, dubia roaches, etc. I checked with Petsmart and they’re facing similar issues.

The latest USDA harvest data confirms what many of us have been dreading: the U.S. winter wheat crop is projected to be the smallest since 1970. What makes this critical is that this historic drop comes right on the heels of two consecutive years of poor yields, effectively wiping out our safety buffer of domestic grain reserves. Droughts in the U.S. have battered fields, while ongoing Strait of Hormuz shipping disruptions continue to drive up nitrogen-based fertilizer costs. With North American stockpiles depleted, global food security now pivots entirely to the upcoming Southern Hemisphere harvest in places like Australia this winter. If the developing 2026-2027 Super El Niño cycle delivers the projected droughts to Australia, we won't have the reserves to cushion the blow, setting up a major price shock. Keep a close eye on global export policy shifts over the next few months, as government export bans are where the first real signs of market panic will show up.

At current rates, they're going to have to stop withdrawing from the reserve around September or October. That's because going too low will severely damage the salt caverns where the oil is stored. Once that's done, the artificially lower prices will spike. Combined with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and Ukraine destroying much of Russia's oil export capacity, $5 a gallon is looking very realistic.

Kasto Gas ko shortage ho hai Ktm tirw tw...!!!

Hijo dinvari sabbai dulerw sodherw ni kahi xaina vanxan xya dikka lagyo...!!!

Two things that have nothing to do with each other happened in the same three weeks and they're now compounding.

Thing one: the Strait of Hormuz. A peace deal signed June 17 gave Iran a 60-day toll-free reopening window, and it genuinely worked for a few weeks — oil traded back down to pre-war levels by June 29, Qatari LNG carriers started re-entering the Gulf, tanker traffic picked back up. Then the week of July 7 it all came apart: the ceasefire ended, Iran fired on six Gulf states in a single barrage (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, Oman, UAE — hit the UAE's Fujairah bypass terminal directly), the US Navy reinstated its blockade on Iranian shipping July 14, and Yemen's Houthis formally joined the war, threatening to close the Red Sea's Bab el-Mandeb strait too. A drone hit a docked tanker at Iraq's Basra export terminal July 16. Brent gained back three weeks of decline in about five days.

Thing two, happening at the same time and mostly unrelated: Ukraine's drone campaign against Russian oil refineries has escalated hard. Ukraine's own General Staff claims 42.74% of Russia's designed refining capacity is now disabled (independent analysts estimate the real functional number closer to a third, which is still enormous). The one that matters most: Omsk, Russia's single largest refinery, was forced offline by a strike the week of July 6-7. Two more (Saratov, Kstovo) were also hit. Russian crude processing has fallen to its lowest level since 2005. Russia's response: it banned all diesel exports on July 8, running through the end of the month.

Why this compounds instead of just adding up: Europe and the US don't buy Russian diesel directly anymore (banned since 2023), but that export ban still tightens the global diesel pool everyone else competes for — right as the Hormuz reopening that was supposed to ease Gulf supply just reversed. Diesel specifically (more than gasoline) is the product that gets squeezed hardest by Middle East supply disruptions, because Middle Eastern crude refines into more of it proportionally.

Concrete effects already showing up:

• Qatar's Ras Laffan LNG facility — which had just started recovering export volumes post-ceasefire — has that recovery interrupted again
• US Strategic Petroleum Reserve is at 316.5 million barrels, the lowest since April 1983, just as a new supply shock hits (the reserve built to buffer exactly this kind of event keeps shrinking during the event itself)
• Australia's five-city average petrol price has climbed roughly 5 cents/litre in the last two and a half weeks as an excise relief measure partially unwinds
• 40+ Russian regions are now restricting domestic fuel sales, Crimea is under a fuel-related state of emergency

None of this is "the world is running out of oil" — US natural gas storage is comfortably above the 5-year average, and EU gas storage refill is actually running slightly ahead of pace for the first time this cycle. It's specifically a diesel and Gulf-LNG story, and it's a story about two separate shocks landing in the same three-week window rather than one big cause.

I track this stuff daily at global-energy-flow.com