Posted on 10/04/2026 6:11:58 AM PDT by MtnClimber
So here we are, with diesel at $6 a gallon.
Listening to the political conversation, you could easily come away thinking this all started when Iran went to war. In fact, it didn’t. Iran supplied the shock, but we had already built the vulnerability, which is a key distinction.
Yes, the war in the Middle East has disrupted oil flows and tightened global supplies. The Energy Information Administration says that tight global distillate supplies and elevated crude prices are pushing diesel prices higher. U.S. distillate inventories have fallen below their five-year range, while the loss of significant refining and petroleum-product supplies worldwide has tightened the market.
However, while that explains why diesel prices are so high right now, it doesn’t explain how we became so vulnerable to price shocks.
The reality is that America still produces enormous quantities of crude oil. The trouble is that crude oil is not diesel. Before it reaches the tank of the truck delivering your groceries, somebody has to transport it, refine it, and distribute it—and that brings us to the question nobody seems especially interested in asking:
What happened to the refineries?
The newest major U.S. refinery came online in 1977.
There is a technical footnote here. A 45,000-barrel-per-day refinery in Galveston began operating in 2022. Forty-five thousand barrels a day. In the world of American refining, that is practically a microbrewery.
The newest refinery with significant downstream capacity, then, is Marathon’s Garyville, Louisiana, refinery, which began operating in 1977. It has since been expanded to roughly 617,000 barrels per day.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Look at all of the refineries shutting down in California because of the democRATs.
“Look at all of the refineries shutting down in California because of the democRATs.”
Not really, it’s DECADES of Republican voters sitting our elections (to let Democrats win), because the Republican they were stuck voting for wasn’t ‘pure enough’ for their tastes.
Thank you Sierra Club and Democrat Communist Party.
Gosh, better nationalize the whole industry. /rimshot!
I had long ago heard that our refinery situation was a large bottleneck in this country. How do you get someone geared up up to do something about it? We have the oil, but apparently can’t get it refined in a timely & satisfactory fashion. If this has gone on since ‘77 why hasn’t someone been working on the problem? We surely have someone in DC who looks at these problems, so why aren’t they working on it? Good grief! 1977 was almost 50 years ago! I sense that someone in our bureaucracy is getting paid, but just not doing the work.
From the title of the article, I thought it would at least spend some paragraphs describing “Cat’ Cracking.”
Refineries until the 1960’s were essentially giant distilleries. There is a natural division of the crude when heated that results in a predictable and steady amount of light products, gasolines, diesels and heavy less desirable products (bunker oil, asphalt bases, etc.).
With modern techniques of so-called “catalytic distilling,” that traditional ratio can be changed to where a column of crude can give something like 95% gasoline and 5% of the others. Diesel, bunker fuel, home heating oil, etc. used to be cheap because every barrel of gasoline caused lots of these low profit products to be made, too. But these products are no longer excess associated products sold for low cost. They now have to be deliberately made and are no longer “along for the ride.”
An expert could describe all this better than I have. But, this article did not talk about this huge technological change in the refining business. It needed to.
It’s all politics. We are paying a dear price for the ascendancy of the extreme green.
I was in the power industry for decades. Power and petroleum suffer the same problem — the top execs and boards attempt to pacify and mollify the green alligator, but he eats you just the same.
“because the Republican they were stuck voting for wasn’t ‘pure enough’ for their tastes.”
That is the definition of a conservative right there.
Then the bigwigs that own the refineries should state all this publicity and call out the politicians responsible.
They don’t care, they make record profits with a restricted supply. They don’t want to increase supply. The have an irreplaceable product that people must buy regardless of the price.
Correct.
Or, they want to “punish” Republicans by voting Democrat.
I’m hearing this for the upcoming mid-term elections, and for POTUS in 2028, over things like high gas prices and the war in Iran.
As if Democrats are going to fix things and not make them worse (such as high gas prices, which they agree with).
You rarely, if ever, hear of Democrats doing this.
Truck drivers in California would be happy to pay $6.00/gallo for diesel.
“As of October 3, 2026, the average price of diesel in California is $8.38 per gallon, according to AAA data.”
Of course California is sitting on huge reserves of oil and natural gas - but due to Democrat policies such as “green” and “carbon cutting” initiatives, along with onerous regulations, very little of it is being pumped, let alone refined - as two major refineries, that produced ≈ 20% of California’s gasoline, shut down due to
Any luck with gaining authorization to BUILD more refinery capacity? If this is the bottleneck, then a crash priority program of getting such facilities online is much overdue.
The Manhattan Project gave us an atomic weapon in something like three years or so. A complex to convert crude oil into so many of its useful components should not be that much of a stretch, as most of the engineering is already worked out, and the need is there.
“Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis for GasBuddy, which tracks U.S. gasoline prices, estimated that 60% to 65% of the recent diesel price spike stems from Ukrainian attacks on Russian facilities, with the remainder caused by Iran’s efforts to choke off transit through the Strait of Hormuz and other vital transit points.”
https://politifact.com/article/2026/sep/15/diesel-oil-russia-ukraine-prices/
“(sitting out elections because the Republican isn’t ‘pure enough’) is the definition of a conservative right there.”
[if I’m reading you correctly]
I guess that makes those who call themselves Conservatives, actually Democrat Enablers, then.
now, do the national debt...
A locomotive can move a ton of freight about 423 miles on a gallon of (diesel) fuel.
If a bottle of California wine weighs four pounds, and one drinks a bottle a day every day for 365 days, and the bottles have to be shipped 3,000 miles to the local warehouse, how much fuel is needed?
At $6.20 a gallon, how much would the fuel cost?
If the fuel went up in price 60% in the past year, how much did the increase cost?
Do not emote, calculate.
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