Aden residents queue for hours as cooking gas and fuel shortage enters third week
Yemen Herald News 
Residents of Aden are queuing for hours in summer heat for cooking gas and fuel, as a shortage that began in late July runs into its third week and spreads into the city’s transport and commercial life. Lines of vehicles stretch for blocks outside filling stations that are either closed or overwhelmed, and stacks of empty cylinders sit outside distribution points waiting for supply that has not arrived.
The queues start before dawn. One resident said he had reached a distribution point at four in the morning and was still without a cylinder by midday. Others described returning on consecutive days without success. For households that cook on bottled gas and have no practical alternative, the wait is not an inconvenience but a daily interruption of the most basic routine.
The shortage has spilled into transport. Fathi, a bus driver, said he had spent more than nine hours waiting at a filling station instead of working, losing a day’s earnings for his family. Drivers across the city report similar losses, and the reduced number of vehicles in service has pushed fares up for everyone else. Local reporting has described a partial paralysis of transport and commercial services as the crisis deepened.
Prices have moved sharply. Residents said the cost of a domestic gas cylinder has risen from about 9,000 Yemeni rials to around 16,000, roughly 5.50 to 9.70 dollars at prevailing rates in Aden. Where official distribution points have run dry, a black market has expanded to fill the gap, selling at higher prices still to those who can pay and leaving poorer households to wait.
Some residents blame the distributors directly. Mutie al-Sanidi, an Aden resident, accused the gas company of allowing shortages to develop in order to drive prices up. That allegation has not been substantiated and the company rejects it, but it reflects a broader lack of trust in the institutions that manage fuel supply in government-held areas.
The Yemen Gas Company has pointed to maintenance. It said work at the Safer facilities, which began on 26 July, disrupted the flow of domestic gas, and that the work was nearing completion. In a statement on 5 August the company said it was coordinating with the Ministry of Oil and local authorities to resolve distribution problems and to move household cooking gas to the provinces as quickly as possible. Residents have remained sceptical, noting that supply did not visibly improve in the days that followed.
Officials have also cited problems on the road. Authorities have attributed part of the shortfall to tribal gunmen stopping gas tankers travelling from Marib governorate, the source of most of the domestic gas consumed in government-held areas. Local reporting has pointed additionally to poor distribution management, with overlapping responsibilities between agencies, disagreements among authorities and weak oversight slowing any effective response.
Restaurants, bakeries and small food businesses have been squeezed on the same supply. Owners who cannot secure commercial cylinders have cut opening hours or raised prices, passing the shortage down to customers who are already paying more for the transport needed to reach them.
The gas crisis has not arrived in isolation. Aden has been contending with extended power cuts and water shortages through the summer, a combination in which each failure compounds the others. Electricity outages during the hottest months push demand towards fuel for private generators, which in turn tightens the supply of the same fuel that households and drivers are queuing for.
The city’s economy magnifies the effect. Aden is the interim seat of the internationally recognised government and the main commercial gateway for the south, but public salaries there are paid irregularly and the Yemeni rial has lost much of its value against the dollar in government-held areas over the course of the war. When the price of a gas cylinder nearly doubles, it does so against wages that have not moved.
The shortage also has a longer history. Yemen’s domestic gas supply depends on production and processing infrastructure degraded by more than a decade of conflict and underinvestment, and on overland routes crossing territory where authority is fragmented. Interruptions of this kind have recurred repeatedly, including a severe cooking gas shortage in Aden in the summer of 2025, and each recurrence finds households with fewer reserves than the last.
The disruption also reaches beyond Aden. Neighbouring governorates draw on the same distribution network, and reporting from southern Yemen has described the energy squeeze extending towards Hadramout, where fuel and electricity problems have followed a similar pattern this summer.
Relief organisations have limited scope to substitute. Cooking fuel is not typically distributed at scale as humanitarian aid, and United Nations agencies working in Yemen have said funding for their operations in the country falls well short of requirements. Households that cannot obtain gas tend to fall back on charcoal or firewood, which costs more over time, harms health indoors and puts further pressure on scarce local resources.
For now the queues continue. The gas company says the maintenance that triggered the disruption is finishing; residents say they will believe it when the cylinders arrive. Between those two positions sit thousands of families in Aden organising their days around a line that may or may not move.
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