After suffering months of supply chain chaos, a dearth of drivers and surging fuel prices, Germany’s trucking industry is facing a new crisis: a chronic shortage of the liquid that keeps its vehicles on the road.

  AdBlue, a mixture of urea and deionised water, is the lifeblood of logistics. But stocks are drying up after SKW Piesteritz, a company in the east German town of Wittenberg, which is one of Germany’s biggest sources of the solution, halted production to cope with the soaring price of gas.

  Dirk Engelhardt, head of the BGL, a trade body for the haulage industry, said he was being besieged by anxious companies that were running out of AdBlue, which neutralises nitric oxide emissions from diesel engines.

  “Lorries can’t move without it,” he said. “There is going to be such an outcry in the population if supply chains break down and supermarkets empty out.”

  The German economy is heading for recession, burdened by its worst energy crisis since the second world war. Moscow’s decision to cut off gas supplies pushed prices to levels four times higher than a year ago — prompting some energy-intensive plants to halt operations even as the government held out the prospect of generous subsidies to bring down costs.

  SKW Piesteritz became one of the most high-profile casualties of the surge in gas prices when it shut down completely in August. It later brought one of its two production lines back up to “minimum levels”, spokesman Christopher Profitlich said, but the second remains offline. “If we’d kept producing we would have been making losses of €100mn every month,” he said.