For the devout, Diet Coke is less a beverage and more a liquid religion, with strict canonical rules about vessel form. The aluminum can is the holy grail, the fountain version at McDonald's the promised land. But in India, the faithful are facing a crisis of faith: the nation's Diet Coke, available only in aluminum, is vanishing from shelves, Reuters reports, thanks to supply chain chaos stemming from the war in Iran.
The Middle East produces 7 million metric tons of aluminum annually - 9 percent of the world's capacity - and exports 75 percent of it. Since February, prices have been climbing like a caffeinated addict, with a ton hitting $3,600 in April, a four-year high. Aluminum is everywhere: solar panels, MacBooks, airplane fuselages, deodorant, heartburn pills, and your cold brew. The U.S. isn't facing mass shortages yet, but the price shocks are already doing laps around the globe.
The region's cheap power made it an aluminum hub, but when Iran started restricting traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, Gulf plants struggled to import bauxite and export pure metal. Qatar and Bahrain shut down smelters. Then, on March 28, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched drone and missile attacks on two aluminum facilities, including the Al Taweelah plant in Abu Dhabi - which produced 1.6 million tons last year - shutting it down completely. That took about 3.2 million tons of global aluminum offline, straining economies like India's that rely on that supply.
In the U.S., the metal is even pricier, thanks to Donald Trump - one of the planet's most famous Diet Coke enthusiasts - who raised tariffs on aluminum imports last year, pushing away Canadian metal and pulling in more from the UAE and Bahrain. Now the U.S. has the highest aluminum prices anywhere and is extra vulnerable to Gulf shocks.
The U.S. imports far more aluminum than it produces, but shortages haven't fully hit yet. “America has some buffers: inventories, contracted supply, secondary aluminium and metal already in the pipeline,” Paul Adkins of AZ Global told me. Americans can still get the metal if they're willing to pay more - for now. Meanwhile, Asian economies are already suffering: Vietnam faces fertilizer and fuel shortages punishing rice farmers; Japan frets over naphtha shortages; Taiwan's semiconductor makers can't get helium.
India depends heavily on Middle Eastern scrap aluminum, and factories are running low. The country is the world's second-largest aluminum producer, but the war in Iran has made powering those factories more expensive, slowing production. Also, last year the Bureau of Indian Standards tightened aluminum regulations, reducing usable metal supply.
Globally, it's going to get worse before it gets better. Even if the war ended today, smelters - power-hungry beasts - take time to restart. “It's a little like if you have a big house and there's a blackout,” Jean Simard of the Aluminum Association of Canada told me. “Normally, you should unplug all your appliances to avoid a surge when the current comes back. It's exactly the same phenomena with a smelter, except that you're talking about megapower.”
Most people aren't shopping for industrial aluminum, but the longer prices stay high, the more companies pass costs down. The economic strain of the war in Iran is measured in more than just oil - and in India, it's showing up in your Diet Coke can.