What this article fails to mention is that there are also a record number of empty tankers routed to the US refineries right now, with the intention of shifting still-relatively cheap US oil products to overseas markets where the prices are already much higher and shortages have already hit. The effects of the Iran war on the US economy will really start to kick in over the next several months.
California also needs a special blend that is only required in California (CARBOB). A lot of that is refined outside of the US, because there is not the capacity domestically. Cali could immediately have more fuel and cheaper prices by dropping their special requirements.
… except that it’s wildly expensive per gallon compared to the rest of the US.
If you’re making six figures on two incomes, it’s plenty tolerable.
If you’re single and working as a street sweeper or make $60K a year outside the cities, it makes you want to burn the system down.
For anyone who isn’t rolling in cash, it’s economically oppressive. I’m not surprised that breeds resentment. I consider this the biggest blind spot of green movements: “It’s not that much more expensive to be green” said by someone who can afford it to people who can’t. A modern “let them eat cake.”
Sure but do you recall what LA looked like in the 80's? The gas is more expensive but the unseen cost of that level of pollution is very high. The gov can solve all future gas problems with EV subsidies and manufacturers can help solve this problem by making affordable EVs, but getting the current admin or manufacturers to do either seems like a cruel joke at this point. The fed is going as far as to deny Chinese car imports because the EVs are so cheap it would crash the US car industry.
Prices just shot up over a dollar nationally and no one is burning anything down.
The real "let them eat cake" is the biggest polluters externalizing the costs of that pollution down to the people, all while the state is dismantling the EPA and clean energy.
Imagine if we had real public transportation across the nation. Less pollution AND cheaper for the average person. Wonder why that isn't happening.
Because the US is overwhelmingly urban sprawl and is not Europe. The only way to fix this is to tear down and rebuild (which we cannot afford), or accept that public transit wait times are terribly slow due to the distance between stops.
Combine that with a lack of nerve to aggressively combat crime or antisocial behavior on transit, maybe a fear of perpetuating inequality or something, and anyone who isn’t a man doesn’t feel safe trying it.
Last year there was some rumbling that Newsom would start to increase production because two refineries were closing sooner than later with the prospect of much higher gas prices. Since CA is really pushing renewables hard and transitioning off of fossil fuels, all the front runners for CA governor have indicated they are steadfastly against increasing production.
He can allow non-California-special-blend gasoline to be sold in California, as a temporary emergency measure. This does not increase any production, but it massively increases the production of gasoline that can legally be sold in California.
(As a side benefit, he can also blame the need on Trump, if the environmentalists get on his case...)
The California Air Resource Board (CARB) has promulgated a revised Cap and Invest rule that threatens the viability of the remaining refineries. All the remaining California refineries have sent CARB, the Governor and the CA legislature letters pointing this out.
California is now a net importer of gasoline following these refinery closures.
He's trying to control the oil that goes to China. First, take Maduro then close the Straight of Hormuz (to prevent oil going to China). The rest is just collateral damage as far as he's concerned.
This is all about keeping China down, and preserving American Hegemony. That's his definition of "making America great again". He doesn't care that you're paying more for food, gasoline, etc. and that the rest of the third world will soon be starving.
Gulf States get a swap line (can't let Wall St crash), but you get no bail out because the elites don't care that you are hurting. They care about the Gulf States hurting because that ultimately means Wall St will crash which would hurt the Billionaire elites.
So to sum up, the reason is maintain America's Hegemony and protect the Billionaire class.
We could die chocking on the air that produces too. Understand the history in CA and the reasons we have special gas. Would you really want to hurt children for cheaper gas? Really?
Those rules around special gasoline were made when both federal and California car exhaust regulations were much looser than today, and electric cars were a complete pipe dream. I've seen estimates ranging for savings from $.25 to $1 per gallon if California dropped the requirements.
>Would you really want to hurt children for cheaper gas?
You didn't really address his main point. Will this lead to higher levels of pollution that will have real health consequences? Oddly you suggest it's not valid to raise concerns around health consequences.
"Poor air quality does not affect all parts of LA equally. Communities of color and low-income residents are disproportionately impacted by polluted air. In certain areas, traffic-related emissions, including nitrogen oxides (NOx), carbon monoxide (CO), and benzene concentrations, are up to 60% higher.
A study led by UCLA found that the air in disadvantaged neighborhoods contained not only more fine particulate matter, but also more toxic particulates as well. Places facing the most socioeconomic disadvantages “experience about 65% higher toxicity than people in the most advantaged group,” according to Suzanne Paulson, UCLA professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and the senior author of the study.
These same groups often have less access to health care and good nutrition, putting them at an even greater health risk. Everyone deserves to breathe clean air, and communities of color and low-income residents are unfortunately facing the worst of LA’s notorious smog."
Saving a buck at the expense of someone with no control of their situation is a choice.
> Love living in the country with the highest GDP per capita than hearing stuff like this
It's reality. It doesn't go away if you ignore it. Aversion to higher gas prices isn't a luxury problem for a lot of people. Any realistic strategy for an energy transition has to acknowledge and accomodate that.
I'm not sure that most voters that have lived through smog in SoCal would vote for that. It is easy to decide that its okay to pollute a place where you don't live.
An export ban wouldn’t really help much: US oil production is (now) predominantly light crude, while US refinery capacity is oriented towards heavy crude from the gulf or Venezuela.
We produce more oil than we use, but we can’t refine it all.
Refining light crude is essentially the same process as heavy crude with fewer steps. US refineries are designed to handle virtually any kind of crude and are highly configurable. That flexibility is part of what makes their refinery business so successful. US refinery capacity is ~50% larger than their domestic oil production; it is a major export business for the US.
The real cost to not processing heavy crude oil is that many refinery assets will be sitting idle because they aren't needed to process light crude.
It may be a bad idea (for various reasons), but it is one already being floated. Here is a press release just today from a California congressman who is proposing a bill to this effect.
If you agree with the parent that Americans are going to feel more energy market pain in the coming months I would imagine the pressure for this will only increase.
It could help in the long term by underwritig refinery retooling. The problem is you'd almost certainly need public support for those investments, given they could be undone by the lifting of such a ban. (An export ban would also trash America's reputation with our import partners.)
> An export ban wouldn’t really help much: US oil production is (now) predominantly light crude, while US refinery capacity is oriented towards heavy crude from the gulf or Venezuela.
That's not too much of a problem. A refinery tooled for heavy sour crude technically can process light, heavy, sour and sweet crude - the other way around would be an issue because you'd need to construct hydrocracker and desulfurizer stages first.
The issue is a financial one. A refinery is often a multi-billion dollar asset, and having significant parts of its value sit around unused for prolonged times means write-offs which means stonk number go down, and as we all know there is nothing more important for the economy than the stonk market.
Another, but smaller, problem is that running a refinery on different crude compositions means that the volume ratio of the various oil products changes, and the refinery may find itself sitting on more, say, heavy fuel oil than it can store, sell and ship. And once the tanks are full, production has to stop.
"U.S. crude oil and lease condensate proved reserves decreased 1% from 46.4 billion barrels to 46.0 billion barrels at year-end 2024" [1]. At February's 180 million barrel/month import rate, that's only 21 years of supply in the ground.
Reliance on oil, for America, is a long-term reliance on foreign oil.
Fake numbers, but I have heard it is something like the US produces 100 units of light crude -exports it all, and imports 50 units of heavy. Net exporter, but the stuff we use domestically for gas refineries comes from elsewhere.
Technically, the refineries can be retooled to take a different blend, but it is expensive to do.
It’s actually harder (requires more advanced technology) to refine heavy and sour crude. The US refining industry process this type of oil mainly because it’s more profitable not because of some limitation.
American oil on the other hand (As in extracted out of the ground) is actually too high quality for domestic consumption therefore gets shipped overseas and sold at a premium. The weird economics of this are made possible by globalization. While it’s not fungible on a dime it’s easy to solve and the US really does hold all the cards when it comes to the petroleum industry.
US crude oil is exported to foreign refineries for blending purposes. By blending low-quality crude with high-quality crude it can reduce the total costs to the refiner even after accounting for the fact that you had to buy high-quality crude to improve the properties of the domestic crude.
Depending on the type of oil and the refinery availability it's not that simple. Not all sources of oil can go to all refineries.
Also, there's the bigger geopolitical problems that creates. If the US knocks over the global energy supply and then retreats and abandons our trading partners, the knock-on effects would be even worse.
A large part of the reason WWII existed was the breakdown of international trade during the Great Depression. Countries without domestic supplies of their own were forced to grab territory instead of peacefully trading for what they needed.
The type of oil that the US produces (light and sweet) can't be handled by US refineries which need (heavy sours). Why we are still a major importer of oil.
If you are referring to American light crude oil grades such as WTI (West Texas Intermediate) that is not correct. That oil could be refined in California. It would have to come by tanker from the gulf coast through the Panama Canal to get there. Until recently it would have to come on a Jones Act US flagged tanker (expensive, scarce). That requirement has been temporarily waived.
All the more reason why we need to move off of everything that doesn't require gasoline/diesel: those are precious resources that shouldn't be wasted on Starbucks runs.
Isn't 4-6 weeks about normal conditions? It feels like a large amount of slack for a modern JIT logistical system. Anymore enters strategic reserves territory.
Usually when something like this is reported, it is because of some other milestone.
Like, they have 6 weeks, on hand, in tanks already delivered.
But, all of the ships in-bound are now done.
After the war started, there was a record number of ships, already filled, already in-transit. But now they have all reached their destinations. So there is no more incoming.
Other countries have $15k new electric city cars for sale. The US doesn't. Our domestic car manufacturers are either uninterested or unable to make them, and import bans are in place on foreign cars that meet that price point.
Also our infra not being 240v is hurting us. The rest of the world can just plug in overnight to any regular outlet and it is good enough for almost any commute.
My EV on a 120v outlet I can manage, but it'd be hard with a second EV.
The lack of ecosystem for good electric scooters is also sad. The weather in much of cali is perfect for it. Last time I went back to China the streets were so quiet as all the electric scooters drove by. An incredible change for the better.
I remember stepping into an apartment parking garage that was filled with scooter charging spaces, like hundreds of them. It was crazy.
Then I went to Taiwan and while walking around I barely talk over the noise from all the gas mopeds.
I joked that the streets in China and quiet and the sidewalks noisy, and the streets of Taiwan are noisy and the sidewalks are quiet.
I think most of the US has 240 to the home. Look at your power feed, if there are two insulated conductors on an uninsulated line, those are two 120V lines of opposite phase/polarity. I have a friend who temporarily ran a 240 volt welder by plugging into a custom outlet box, wired with two plugs that went to two outlets on different legs of the breaker box. Electric ovens, ACs, hot tubs, dryers, etc. are all commonly 240 and work with the right house breaker and wiring setup.
The difference is other countries have 240 running everywhere. So apartment garages can have cars charging (slower than the max possible speed but faster than if they were on 120v), without tens of thousands of dollars in retrofits.
I just got an estimate of 3k for running basically 6ft of conduit for a new 240v line in my own garage (my breaker is right next to my door, super short run!)
Now thinking about my last condo I lived in, retrofitting even a small condo parking garage for EV chargers for, say, 20 spaces. Let's estimate 30 feet on average line run per space. Assuming a discount on price, maybe 12k per parking space to install a 240 plug, with lines split to cover multiple spaces.
The price is just absurd. That's 1/3rd the cost of a reasonably priced car.
Most residential mains is 240v on two legs that gets divided to 120v outlets. However, major appliances like dryer/HVAC will use the 240v. I had a 240v outlet added to my garage for larger equipment. It is absolutely possible to add a 240v charger at single family homes with a visit from an electrician. The US standard of 120v is not an issue.
> Also our infra not being 240v is hurting us. The rest of the world can just plug in overnight to any regular outlet and it is good enough for almost any commute.
US homes don't need any significant accommodations for 240 volt infra. Plenty of US home appliances are already 240 volt; this is a solved problem.
In other countries every outlet is 240, a regular extension cord to outlets in a apartment complex garage is 240. It is less overall amps than the beefy 240v an American dryer plugs into, but it is good enough.
Meanwhile $3k to get 5 feet of 240 ran in a conduit and an outlet installed in the US.
For many apartment and condo complexes, it just isn't doable as a reasonable retrofit.
> Meanwhile $3k to get 5 feet of 240 ran in a conduit and an outlet installed in the US.
If you're the homeowner you can do this work yourself, and the permits and inspections will cost a tenth of that. If you live in one of the few states where this isn't true, that's a you problem.
> For many apartment and condo complexes, it just isn't doable as a reasonable retrofit.
The problem with charging in apartments and condo complexes is not that US outlets are not 240 volts, it's that if those places provide places to park at all then there's little chance those parking spots are electrified at all in the first place.
Yeah this confuses me. I was under the impression that every electric oven and clothes dryer in the US was 240 (220) volts already. I was not aware or tracking that 240v was an issue. Is that the case in places in the US?
Keeping in mind that US electric infrastructure is the oldest in the world and fragmented across a slew of jurisdictions with their own building codes that electrified in different decades, thus making it impossible to say anything with 100% certainty: US homes already have 240 volt service, but split-phase so it often appears to be 120 volts. I edited the prior comment with an informative video.
Nearly all US homes have 240V to the electric panel, and some have it for specific places in the house (though many places are almost entirely gas dryers/ovens), but you would need a special outlet run to charge your car at 240V since almost all regular receptacles are 120v. Even the heavy duty receps in garages and utility spaces are most often just 20A/120V instead of the standard 15A/120V.
Quotes for a new 240V line are often >$1K which is affordable in the context of a household improvement but not exactly pocket change.
The bigger problem isn't the 240v, it's that a lot of people just don't have parking that's practical for plugging in without extensive rewiring (a vast majority of condo/apartment garages) or running a hundred-foot extension cord down the building and across sidewalk (https://i.imgur.com/ou0uYmb.jpeg).
It may rebound back to these levels due to the gas price increase, and many car manufacturers slashing their prices to compensate for the subsidy ending.
That number you quote was from the fourth quarter of 2025. EV tax benefits expired in the third quarter of 2025. People who were on the fence all bought during the third quarter. The market share was 29.1%.
I assume people are worried about former "we have 12 years before doom" people, having all converted into "burn Teslas" people, destroying some of the best electric cars on the planet.
When you see the U.S Government making near daily public statements with the intended effect of calming markets and the public.... It's time to be worried. A.K.A when the government says "everything is going to be ok, don't worry we got this under control" that's when shit is bad. This is what we have been seeing. It seems we are near a tipping point now.
Well, things can be bad because they are inherently bad, or things can be bad because people are panicking, and panicking people react in ways that make situations worse.
Saying "it's going to be OK" doesn't change any circumstances. But it may reduce the level of panic (depending on how much the people trust the government), and that can in fact change the way the circumstances evolve.
In the previous 2022 gas price spike, some stations could not dispense more than $100 worth of gas since that would previously indicate something wrong with the station.
That'll confuse the average driver. The number of people that know the various measurements for fluids is not that high. I can totally see some future social media posts excited about the $2.99 price and then getting upset when the pump shows .25 gallons.
Even if you know the measurements it would be confusing to see a sign say $2.99 for gas and it turn out to be for a quart and not a gallon when you pull up. It's assumed at this point that it's per gallon.
I'm a bit perplexed on this one-- Yes, we refine our own blend of gasoline, but it's based on market oil -- nothing about the war we started with Iran impacts our domestic refining capability.
Also, oil takes longer to get from Iran to the west coast than to the east coast. Shouldn't the east coast be the first to notice decreased shipments, because the west coast essentially has a stock still in transit for longer?
EDIT: Nevermind, now I see that 25% of CA gas is refined overseas.
CA’s requirement that it gets its own blend of gas is combined with how its openly hostile towards its ever decreasing refineries and that it is impossible for a new refinery to ever open makes it’s supplies absurdly limited
People in LA need to breathe during the summer time. So yes we demand a blend that protects our residents. And the refiners are choosing to close refineries. They are not being compelled.
They are being strangled, it’s their choice to tap out is how I would put it.
The improvement in air quality is due to the clean air act, catalytic converters, and the shuttering of industry, the gas blend plays a minor part. Even then, with gas so much higher it will materially make peoples lives worse, at some point society would be better off getting rid of the blend.
It's bonkers that some of the most expensive gas you'll ever buy is in SF, and Martinez is right there. You could bike there, if they allowed bikes on the bridge.
> CA’s requirement that it gets its own blend of gas is combined with how its openly hostile towards its ever decreasing refineries and that it is impossible for a new refinery to ever open makes it’s supplies absurdly limited
A big one is a lack of pipelines.
As I understand it, California sits on so much oil, nobody has built a pipeline.
Building an energy pipeline in California is like bringing sand to the beach. The energy is already there.
"California’s top foreign refinery supplier of gasoline and blendstocks this decade is Reliance Industries Ltd.’s Jamnagar refinery complex in western India. "
"More than 9 million barrels arrived via this loophole in 2025"
Now, that's a tiny fraction of the 320M barrels of gas used in CA annually, but anything that affects global oil shipments will be felt in California.
15% in absolute terms, 22% in per capita terms. And it is state policy to allow no more additional ICE cars in less than ten years, no net emissions in less than 20 years. Investing in a refinery today would obviously be folly.
And what they secured (if they secured anything) was basically future. It's going to take years to ramp Venezuelan production back up to what it would be with decent management.
Governments have gotten in the bad habit of acting like nothing will ever go wrong. Living paycheck-to-paycheck, so to speak. Cali not the only one suffering this fate. It doesnt matter if it's Trump's fault or not. Lets just say it is. Bad things happen. You have to be ready.
You're not wrong, but also how "ready" is "ready enough"? What about things the US doesn't generally have access to? Rare earth minerals? Helium? Cobalt? Coffee?
It also costs money to build the infra for storage and more money to maintain. There's always a trade-off. I think governments have done an acceptable job of being ready, but they are predicated on the assumption that the global order that the developed world has largely enjoyed for several decades remains largely intact.
It's a bad assumption in hindsight because some folks chose to go over a cliff over fixing deep-seated problems. You can't really control for chaos.
Moving to green and nuclear energy, pressing hard to upgrade the national grid would be the obvious things to reduce our short-term dependence on fossil fuels.
Energy independence is not a pipe dream, and it isn't ever going to be 100%. We should be working toward it.
We may be somewhat dependent on China or other sources for solar panels, for example, but once we have the product, it has a multi-decade lifetime compared to an instantly-consumed fuel.
Even if you're a fossil fuel fanatic, one should be advocating for more of our refineries to be tooled for processing our own crude oil. But that isn't as profitable in the short term, so we don't do it.
P.S. politically, we've seen our system does not have the capacity to deal with a malicious executive taking total control of the government. We need a complete rebuild of our legislative and executive branches.
Not just scrapping them - literally paying foreign companies billions of dollars to not build wind farms. Illegally as well, there’s absolutely no authority for these payments to happen outside of Congress.
We were fully warned of this with the supply chain disruption of covid.
Global supply chain has become dangerously dependent upon a stable geopolitical environment that has been unnaturally provided by the United States for the last near 100 years in post world war II.
This unipolar naval supremacy is not a normal situation. One of the things that triggered world war I was an escalating arms race in battleships between Germany and Great Britain.
I would recommend the United States practically every country, Force its automobile manufacturers to go very hardcore down the plugin hybrid electric vehicle, which will maximize the battery supply to electrify the largest amount of daily consumer transportation.
I would say you should impose a minimum of 40 to 50 mi for an all-electric range, The 20 mile range which is degraded to really about 12 now is not sufficient in my four phev.
Hybrids also weighs far less gasoline and idling and low torque low RPM situations like stop and go and sitting in traffic jams, by utilizing gener of breaking, using the electric motor for the 0-25 acceleration that ICE engines are incredibly inefficient at.
It's my opinion that the equipment and manufacturing switchover should be much less of an imposition on car manufacturers than the full EV switchover. Consumers do not have such a shocking switch to driving habits because a phev just functions like a normal ICE car if the battery drains, it solves long-range transportation issues and concerns with EVs.
Most car manufacturers know how to make turbocharged high efficiency compact engines, most major manufacturers I believe know how to use Atkinson cycle with variable valve timing combined with a hybrid drivetrain to further boost gas efficiency
I mean, there's a lot of blame to go around, but tearing up a working deal that gave us unprecedented, multilateral access to Iran's nuclear facilities, and then later jumping into a war of choice with no clear objectives and seemingly being surprised by the most obvious geopoltical realities that people with any shred of a clue have been talking about for DECADES would seem to have at least something to do with the current mess.
In my book, the silver lining is that this might finally push the world to move away from fossil fuels in a meaningful way.
Yeah but he wouldn't have been in the position to do any of that if the people who funded his campaign like the Adelsons, Kushners, Musk, Linda McMahon, Lutnick and so forth didn't contribute millions to his campaign and leverage whatever other resources they have to promote him.
And they in turn couldn't do any of that if the teams of professionals from lawyers, accountants to engineers didn't help them acquire and use those resources.
Just like violent crime is overwhelmingly perpetuated by a handful of repeat offenders we see the same pattern in white collar crime. A handful of white collar criminals cause damage to American society that cascades through the world resulting in food and fuel shortages that we're talking about.
I get that it's really hard but you have to view this dispassionately and from a systems thinking perspective. The professionals and oligarchs are responsible for the mad king scenario that we're all living through right now. They're responsible for the social decay that affects us daily.
And it's just going to keep getting worse and worse once the mad king eventually goes the way all mad kings do.
Correct, he is the symptom of the problem created by himself.
The Iran nuclear deal rode off the back of Stuxnet and concessions were easier with that damage. The recent strikes with the B2 were largely ineffectual so well done.
> There's plenty of crude oil in CA. Certainly enough for California's needs
California has 1.7 billion barrels of proven reserves [1] and imports 373 million barrels a year [2]. That's 5 years of imports in the ground. (At current rates, California depletes its proven reserves in 2040.)
Nor have restrictions on refining oil or require a special blend of gasoline. It does seem strange to call out Texas as doing something right environmentally.
We've had decades to do something about it, but if Trump deciding to step into a completely unnecessary war and blundering the entire thing is what makes everyone wake up then I guess that's a silver lining.
It is funny that propaganda has somehow convinced conservatives, people who used to idealize self reliance and independence from government dependencies, to move away from solar and EVs.
A EV and a home solar setup with a large battery bank, is the ultimate in self reliance.
I remember even 10 years ago you'd see the occasional right leaning homesteader talking about the benefits of being off grid with a solar setup.
Now days removing our dependencies on foreign powers is somehow a liberal conspiracy. O_o
I was very pleasantly surprised at how much my single cargo e-bike can handle. It is big, nearly the size of a tandem bike, but it served me well for 5 years of not having a car.
Curious about your maintenance needs. I have a guy that comes out once a year for service and tunes it up for me. After 3 years, I replaced the chain. I've upgraded to hydraulic brakes by the same guy. Other than that, it's been smooth riding. Or are you saying your EV needs so little maintenance that even the low maintenance on a bike seem high?
Maintenance should be amortized. The first time you do brakes and tires it will cost more than 5+ years of ebike maintenance. It adds nothing to the conversation to pretend otherwise.
Conservative bots are out strong in Pacific NW forums slop posting against new "green energy" energy projects. Blaming the (not yet built!) green energy projects for upcoming rate increases.
Nevermind that solar is why Texas has such cheap electricity prices.
> no gas bans.
I'm all for the free market.
Price into gas the expected increase in healthcare costs due to air and ground water pollution. Stop subsidizing it for non-critical uses.
Same for extra tire dust from EVs (that shit is toxic AF).
Right now I see astroturfing that EVs are why our electricity infrastructure is overloaded (rather than blaming 50 years of neglect), or that the cars burst into flame (no more than other cars and newer battery tech not any more).
Subsidizing EVs is interesting because it is obvious that EVs are the future (battery tech gets ~6% better year over year, compounding, ICE designs haven't seen improvements in decades), but recent removal of government support caused American car companies to basically give up on anything except the domestic car market, which spells their long term doom (which the Ford CEO has pretty much come out and admitted.)
There's already like 90c of gasoline tax in California and some of the highest auto registration fees, and that's on top of other rules that make it more expensive.
I don't know, can see this either way. Iran's leadership has been stating for decades that they want to destroy Israel. They've been funding militias who launch rockets at Israel, during times when Israel wasn't threatening Iran's existence in any way. They were launching rockets just before this war started. But US pulled out of nuclear deal and killed Iranian leaders during first Trump administration, and has been meddling with Iran for decades.
All I'll say for sure is the US shouldn't be involved, and shouldn't have taken such a one-sided approach during Israel's founding. None of this benefits us, we simply have traitors in our government.
Yes it is a net exporter of oil, but not oil for gasoline. The use is a net importer of oil used for gasoline. That's because oil companies have chosen to not make the investments needed to refine domestic oil. We have to import for that.
Possibly, or more infrastructure is needed to support the growing demand for renewables, and the equipment is often trucked around using standard freight (large trucks or airplanes), concrete trucks to pour slabs, etc.
Electric trucks are rapidly becoming a thing. And even if not, more trucks delivering equipment for renewables get balanced out by more EVs.
Not to mention natural gas and oil will always need to be shipped around. Whereas when you have enough renewables and a grid that can supply enough electricity, shipping panels and batteries drops by a lot.
Yes, and I look forward to when electric freight is a thing, but I do think it's an overstatement to say they are "rapidly becoming a thing". Articles about electric trucks among the HN crowd make it feel that way, but those are tests that don't really reflect what's happening in the market. (Most of the available data puts the overall percentage of freight moved by renewables at less than 0.1%). I suspect we're 10-20 years away from a time when a majority of DC chargers, solar panels, or wind turbines are transported using something other than gasoline or diesel.
Don't get me wrong, I'm quite dogmatic about renewables (we have 2 EVs, pay more for various renewable options, aggressively recycle, avoid single-use plastics, etc). I'm just pragmatic in my outlook.
Isn’t it more dependent on how Trump is feeling? That makes it much more depressing for the leader of the country to be messing with our largest economy like this.
What this article fails to mention is that there are also a record number of empty tankers routed to the US refineries right now, with the intention of shifting still-relatively cheap US oil products to overseas markets where the prices are already much higher and shortages have already hit. The effects of the Iran war on the US economy will really start to kick in over the next several months.
California also needs a special blend that is only required in California (CARBOB). A lot of that is refined outside of the US, because there is not the capacity domestically. Cali could immediately have more fuel and cheaper prices by dropping their special requirements.
Presumably that might get an emergency resolution in the coming weeks.
Is this an emissions reducing based blend?
Yep, it's a low sulfur, lower volatility gasoline blend (https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/how-california-reg...) which apparently cuts harmful exhaust emissions like carbon monoxide and NOx.
Sounds great for people and the environment. Too bad its production is now in danger thanks to horrible, ignorant decisions by this administration.
… except that it’s wildly expensive per gallon compared to the rest of the US.
If you’re making six figures on two incomes, it’s plenty tolerable.
If you’re single and working as a street sweeper or make $60K a year outside the cities, it makes you want to burn the system down.
For anyone who isn’t rolling in cash, it’s economically oppressive. I’m not surprised that breeds resentment. I consider this the biggest blind spot of green movements: “It’s not that much more expensive to be green” said by someone who can afford it to people who can’t. A modern “let them eat cake.”
Sure but do you recall what LA looked like in the 80's? The gas is more expensive but the unseen cost of that level of pollution is very high. The gov can solve all future gas problems with EV subsidies and manufacturers can help solve this problem by making affordable EVs, but getting the current admin or manufacturers to do either seems like a cruel joke at this point. The fed is going as far as to deny Chinese car imports because the EVs are so cheap it would crash the US car industry.
Not everyone in California lives in LA or has LA’s problems.
> Not everyone in California lives in LA or has LA’s problems.
That's why smog rules vary per county.
I won't engage any further with a strawman argument made in bad faith.
And economically regressive.
I'm not sure I would point the finger at "green movements" though.
Prices just shot up over a dollar nationally and no one is burning anything down.
The real "let them eat cake" is the biggest polluters externalizing the costs of that pollution down to the people, all while the state is dismantling the EPA and clean energy.
Imagine if we had real public transportation across the nation. Less pollution AND cheaper for the average person. Wonder why that isn't happening.
> Wonder why that isn't happening
Because the US is overwhelmingly urban sprawl and is not Europe. The only way to fix this is to tear down and rebuild (which we cannot afford), or accept that public transit wait times are terribly slow due to the distance between stops.
Combine that with a lack of nerve to aggressively combat crime or antisocial behavior on transit, maybe a fear of perpetuating inequality or something, and anyone who isn’t a man doesn’t feel safe trying it.
Yes.
Last year there was some rumbling that Newsom would start to increase production because two refineries were closing sooner than later with the prospect of much higher gas prices. Since CA is really pushing renewables hard and transitioning off of fossil fuels, all the front runners for CA governor have indicated they are steadfastly against increasing production.
Gavin Newsom warms to Big Oil in climate reversal: https://calmatters.org/politics/2025/08/oil-compromise-calif...
I think your idea is a great solution to the problem and would give politicians cover with their environmental base and a win for their constituents.
> Newsom would start to increase production
Newsom is not a refinery nor does he own any refineries. He cannot increase any production by definition.
He can allow non-California-special-blend gasoline to be sold in California, as a temporary emergency measure. This does not increase any production, but it massively increases the production of gasoline that can legally be sold in California.
(As a side benefit, he can also blame the need on Trump, if the environmentalists get on his case...)
Does this have anything to do with the extensive and happening now or very recent shutdowns of several california refineries?
Yes. Between 2020 and present The refining capacity in California declined by 35% from 1.9 MM BPD to 1.2 MM BPD with the closure of 4 refineries:
Marathon Martinez (2020) converted to renewables. Crude capacity 157 MBD, Renewables capacity 48 MBD
P66 Rodeo (2022) converted to renewables. Crude capacity 120 MBD, Renewables capacity 50 MBD
P66 LA (2025) shutdown. Crude capacity 139 MBD
Valero Bencia (2026) shutdown. Crude capacity 145 MBD
The California Air Resource Board (CARB) has promulgated a revised Cap and Invest rule that threatens the viability of the remaining refineries. All the remaining California refineries have sent CARB, the Governor and the CA legislature letters pointing this out.
California is now a net importer of gasoline following these refinery closures.
Nice of Donald Trump to force us into a choice between poisoning the air and financial hardship! But at least it was for a good reason: ???
Dogs and cats were being eaten, you see. And did you hear her laugh?
He's trying to control the oil that goes to China. First, take Maduro then close the Straight of Hormuz (to prevent oil going to China). The rest is just collateral damage as far as he's concerned.
This is all about keeping China down, and preserving American Hegemony. That's his definition of "making America great again". He doesn't care that you're paying more for food, gasoline, etc. and that the rest of the third world will soon be starving.
Gulf States get a swap line (can't let Wall St crash), but you get no bail out because the elites don't care that you are hurting. They care about the Gulf States hurting because that ultimately means Wall St will crash which would hurt the Billionaire elites.
So to sum up, the reason is maintain America's Hegemony and protect the Billionaire class.
We could die chocking on the air that produces too. Understand the history in CA and the reasons we have special gas. Would you really want to hurt children for cheaper gas? Really?
https://today.usc.edu/las-environmental-success-story-cleane...
Those rules around special gasoline were made when both federal and California car exhaust regulations were much looser than today, and electric cars were a complete pipe dream. I've seen estimates ranging for savings from $.25 to $1 per gallon if California dropped the requirements.
>Would you really want to hurt children for cheaper gas?
Nice appeal to emotion.
You didn't really address his main point. Will this lead to higher levels of pollution that will have real health consequences? Oddly you suggest it's not valid to raise concerns around health consequences.
It's more emotional to drop an important regulation over a dollar. I was already paying $5 for premium before all this and now it's $5.75. Big deal.
I'd rather have clearer skies.
How does ignoring real harm help? Because it cost you less?
https://www.clarity.io/blog/how-air-pollution-affects-childr...
https://www.clarity.io/blog/a-closer-look-at-los-angeles-inf...
"Poor air quality does not affect all parts of LA equally. Communities of color and low-income residents are disproportionately impacted by polluted air. In certain areas, traffic-related emissions, including nitrogen oxides (NOx), carbon monoxide (CO), and benzene concentrations, are up to 60% higher.
A study led by UCLA found that the air in disadvantaged neighborhoods contained not only more fine particulate matter, but also more toxic particulates as well. Places facing the most socioeconomic disadvantages “experience about 65% higher toxicity than people in the most advantaged group,” according to Suzanne Paulson, UCLA professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and the senior author of the study.
These same groups often have less access to health care and good nutrition, putting them at an even greater health risk. Everyone deserves to breathe clean air, and communities of color and low-income residents are unfortunately facing the worst of LA’s notorious smog."
Saving a buck at the expense of someone with no control of their situation is a choice.
https://ifunny.co/picture/yes-the-planet-got-destroyed-but-f...
You obviously never loved through LA Smog. You never had to stay inside or skip school because the air was too dirty to breathe. Take a look at how it was: https://www.ccair.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/LA-smog.jpg
Cars may burn cleaner but they still burn, and there are more of them than ever.
Easing economic pain in exchange for health pain is nonsensical. Breathe from your own tailpipe if its no big deal.
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Texas has plenty of refineries and the children there aren’t dying or choking on the air.
It has to do with LA geography. The surrounding landscape traps the pollution so it cannot dissipate away from the city.
Different geography/topology. https://www.clarity.io/blog/a-closer-look-at-los-angeles-inf...
> Would you really want to hurt children for cheaper gas? Really?
Yes. Most voters would, too. "Cheaper gas" understates how serious even a $20/week increase in living costs can be for a household on the margin.
Love living in the country with the highest GDP per capita than hearing stuff like this.
> Love living in the country with the highest GDP per capita than hearing stuff like this
It's reality. It doesn't go away if you ignore it. Aversion to higher gas prices isn't a luxury problem for a lot of people. Any realistic strategy for an energy transition has to acknowledge and accomodate that.
I'm not sure that most voters that have lived through smog in SoCal would vote for that. It is easy to decide that its okay to pollute a place where you don't live.
In such a situation - especially heading into the midterms - an export ban may be increasingly probable.
An export ban wouldn’t really help much: US oil production is (now) predominantly light crude, while US refinery capacity is oriented towards heavy crude from the gulf or Venezuela.
We produce more oil than we use, but we can’t refine it all.
Refining light crude is essentially the same process as heavy crude with fewer steps. US refineries are designed to handle virtually any kind of crude and are highly configurable. That flexibility is part of what makes their refinery business so successful. US refinery capacity is ~50% larger than their domestic oil production; it is a major export business for the US.
The real cost to not processing heavy crude oil is that many refinery assets will be sitting idle because they aren't needed to process light crude.
It may be a bad idea (for various reasons), but it is one already being floated. Here is a press release just today from a California congressman who is proposing a bill to this effect.
https://sherman.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/congre...
If you agree with the parent that Americans are going to feel more energy market pain in the coming months I would imagine the pressure for this will only increase.
> An export ban wouldn’t really help much
It could help in the long term by underwritig refinery retooling. The problem is you'd almost certainly need public support for those investments, given they could be undone by the lifting of such a ban. (An export ban would also trash America's reputation with our import partners.)
> An export ban wouldn’t really help much: US oil production is (now) predominantly light crude, while US refinery capacity is oriented towards heavy crude from the gulf or Venezuela.
That's not too much of a problem. A refinery tooled for heavy sour crude technically can process light, heavy, sour and sweet crude - the other way around would be an issue because you'd need to construct hydrocracker and desulfurizer stages first.
The issue is a financial one. A refinery is often a multi-billion dollar asset, and having significant parts of its value sit around unused for prolonged times means write-offs which means stonk number go down, and as we all know there is nothing more important for the economy than the stonk market.
Another, but smaller, problem is that running a refinery on different crude compositions means that the volume ratio of the various oil products changes, and the refinery may find itself sitting on more, say, heavy fuel oil than it can store, sell and ship. And once the tanks are full, production has to stop.
> US refinery capacity is oriented towards heavy crude from the gulf or Venezuela.
Or from Alberta.
> an export ban may be increasingly probable
"U.S. crude oil and lease condensate proved reserves decreased 1% from 46.4 billion barrels to 46.0 billion barrels at year-end 2024" [1]. At February's 180 million barrel/month import rate, that's only 21 years of supply in the ground.
Reliance on oil, for America, is a long-term reliance on foreign oil.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/naturalgas/crudeoilreserves/
[2] https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=M...
This is way outside of my area of expertise, but I thought US export oil was not fungible with what we consume.
Fake numbers, but I have heard it is something like the US produces 100 units of light crude -exports it all, and imports 50 units of heavy. Net exporter, but the stuff we use domestically for gas refineries comes from elsewhere.
Technically, the refineries can be retooled to take a different blend, but it is expensive to do.
It’s actually harder (requires more advanced technology) to refine heavy and sour crude. The US refining industry process this type of oil mainly because it’s more profitable not because of some limitation.
American oil on the other hand (As in extracted out of the ground) is actually too high quality for domestic consumption therefore gets shipped overseas and sold at a premium. The weird economics of this are made possible by globalization. While it’s not fungible on a dime it’s easy to solve and the US really does hold all the cards when it comes to the petroleum industry.
US crude oil is exported to foreign refineries for blending purposes. By blending low-quality crude with high-quality crude it can reduce the total costs to the refiner even after accounting for the fact that you had to buy high-quality crude to improve the properties of the domestic crude.
I suppose it's too much to ask that oil produced in the US be used for the US people?
Depending on the type of oil and the refinery availability it's not that simple. Not all sources of oil can go to all refineries.
Also, there's the bigger geopolitical problems that creates. If the US knocks over the global energy supply and then retreats and abandons our trading partners, the knock-on effects would be even worse.
A large part of the reason WWII existed was the breakdown of international trade during the Great Depression. Countries without domestic supplies of their own were forced to grab territory instead of peacefully trading for what they needed.
How do you think the UAE leaving OPEC will effect the oil markets in the coming months and years? Its being touted as having a major impact.
Why would they sell it for less when they could sell it for more?
We’re witnessing “American exceptionalism” transform from a brash claim to a whiny demand in real time.
The type of oil that the US produces (light and sweet) can't be handled by US refineries which need (heavy sours). Why we are still a major importer of oil.
I don’t think it is. If we can then also ensure the US stops meddling in international affairs, we can all be happy!
That's what Canadian oil is for. The USA gets it at a discount price.
Where you can go to monitor this? Does it require an expensive AIS data feed?
Once again, its illegal to use that oil in California due to (imo bad) environmental regulations
If you are referring to American light crude oil grades such as WTI (West Texas Intermediate) that is not correct. That oil could be refined in California. It would have to come by tanker from the gulf coast through the Panama Canal to get there. Until recently it would have to come on a Jones Act US flagged tanker (expensive, scarce). That requirement has been temporarily waived.
Right I forgot we waived the jones act. Refiners are hard to come by in CA though as they keep shutting down
All the more reason why we need to move off of everything that doesn't require gasoline/diesel: those are precious resources that shouldn't be wasted on Starbucks runs.
Isn't 4-6 weeks about normal conditions? It feels like a large amount of slack for a modern JIT logistical system. Anymore enters strategic reserves territory.
Not sure about california specifically, but elsewhere in the world stocks are definitely lower than normal.
https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=10...
Sure, but these aren't normal conditions. So that JIT amount is gonna rapidly become NJIT.
I'm not very creative, but if we could use DJiT to go along with the at fault party's initials, that could be fun.
6 weeks are standard. If you want to keep it for longer it needs additives which increase price. Noone does that usually.
Yeah, seems like a standard supply level to me.
"California’s inventory has averaged just over 20 days of supply over the last five years (2019–23), compared with the U.S. average of 21.6 days."
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=63944
I think they mean that it's 4-6 weeks until they hit zero, accounting both for stored products and the current rate of production/imports.
Usually when something like this is reported, it is because of some other milestone.
Like, they have 6 weeks, on hand, in tanks already delivered.
But, all of the ships in-bound are now done.
After the war started, there was a record number of ships, already filled, already in-transit. But now they have all reached their destinations. So there is no more incoming.
I think in this case it's 6 weeks but _declining_, but that's a good distinction to point out.
Yeah, but what's the burn rate?
If it's going down at 1 day per week then it's not so bad. If it's closer to 0.75 days per day, that's much more serious.
I’m surprised that only “18.9% of new car sales” in California are electric [1].
[1] https://www.energy.ca.gov/news/2026-01/california-surpasses-...
Other countries have $15k new electric city cars for sale. The US doesn't. Our domestic car manufacturers are either uninterested or unable to make them, and import bans are in place on foreign cars that meet that price point.
Also our infra not being 240v is hurting us. The rest of the world can just plug in overnight to any regular outlet and it is good enough for almost any commute.
My EV on a 120v outlet I can manage, but it'd be hard with a second EV.
The lack of ecosystem for good electric scooters is also sad. The weather in much of cali is perfect for it. Last time I went back to China the streets were so quiet as all the electric scooters drove by. An incredible change for the better.
I remember stepping into an apartment parking garage that was filled with scooter charging spaces, like hundreds of them. It was crazy.
Then I went to Taiwan and while walking around I barely talk over the noise from all the gas mopeds.
I joked that the streets in China and quiet and the sidewalks noisy, and the streets of Taiwan are noisy and the sidewalks are quiet.
I think most of the US has 240 to the home. Look at your power feed, if there are two insulated conductors on an uninsulated line, those are two 120V lines of opposite phase/polarity. I have a friend who temporarily ran a 240 volt welder by plugging into a custom outlet box, wired with two plugs that went to two outlets on different legs of the breaker box. Electric ovens, ACs, hot tubs, dryers, etc. are all commonly 240 and work with the right house breaker and wiring setup.
I fully understand the 240 vs 120 in US houses.
The difference is other countries have 240 running everywhere. So apartment garages can have cars charging (slower than the max possible speed but faster than if they were on 120v), without tens of thousands of dollars in retrofits.
I just got an estimate of 3k for running basically 6ft of conduit for a new 240v line in my own garage (my breaker is right next to my door, super short run!)
Now thinking about my last condo I lived in, retrofitting even a small condo parking garage for EV chargers for, say, 20 spaces. Let's estimate 30 feet on average line run per space. Assuming a discount on price, maybe 12k per parking space to install a 240 plug, with lines split to cover multiple spaces.
The price is just absurd. That's 1/3rd the cost of a reasonably priced car.
Its not that 220v is missing, its that its special.
An unmodified garage in australia will have plenty of unused 240v plugs
and if they did want to modify, they can pay to have 3-phase 415v
Most residential mains is 240v on two legs that gets divided to 120v outlets. However, major appliances like dryer/HVAC will use the 240v. I had a 240v outlet added to my garage for larger equipment. It is absolutely possible to add a 240v charger at single family homes with a visit from an electrician. The US standard of 120v is not an issue.
It adds large cost and is a hassle
> our infra not being 240v is hurting us
The 240V requirement has been overplayed, in my opinion. I still have a gas car. But my driving needs would easily be covered with 110V.
> Also our infra not being 240v is hurting us. The rest of the world can just plug in overnight to any regular outlet and it is good enough for almost any commute.
US homes don't need any significant accommodations for 240 volt infra. Plenty of US home appliances are already 240 volt; this is a solved problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMmUoZh3Hq4
In other countries every outlet is 240, a regular extension cord to outlets in a apartment complex garage is 240. It is less overall amps than the beefy 240v an American dryer plugs into, but it is good enough.
Meanwhile $3k to get 5 feet of 240 ran in a conduit and an outlet installed in the US.
For many apartment and condo complexes, it just isn't doable as a reasonable retrofit.
> Meanwhile $3k to get 5 feet of 240 ran in a conduit and an outlet installed in the US.
If you're the homeowner you can do this work yourself, and the permits and inspections will cost a tenth of that. If you live in one of the few states where this isn't true, that's a you problem.
> For many apartment and condo complexes, it just isn't doable as a reasonable retrofit.
The problem with charging in apartments and condo complexes is not that US outlets are not 240 volts, it's that if those places provide places to park at all then there's little chance those parking spots are electrified at all in the first place.
Yeah this confuses me. I was under the impression that every electric oven and clothes dryer in the US was 240 (220) volts already. I was not aware or tracking that 240v was an issue. Is that the case in places in the US?
Keeping in mind that US electric infrastructure is the oldest in the world and fragmented across a slew of jurisdictions with their own building codes that electrified in different decades, thus making it impossible to say anything with 100% certainty: US homes already have 240 volt service, but split-phase so it often appears to be 120 volts. I edited the prior comment with an informative video.
Nearly all US homes have 240V to the electric panel, and some have it for specific places in the house (though many places are almost entirely gas dryers/ovens), but you would need a special outlet run to charge your car at 240V since almost all regular receptacles are 120v. Even the heavy duty receps in garages and utility spaces are most often just 20A/120V instead of the standard 15A/120V.
Quotes for a new 240V line are often >$1K which is affordable in the context of a household improvement but not exactly pocket change.
The bigger problem isn't the 240v, it's that a lot of people just don't have parking that's practical for plugging in without extensive rewiring (a vast majority of condo/apartment garages) or running a hundred-foot extension cord down the building and across sidewalk (https://i.imgur.com/ou0uYmb.jpeg).
That's for Q4 2025.
The $7.5k EV subsidy ended in Q3 2025. Everyone considering buying an EV, bought one right before Q4 2025. The percentage for Q3 2025 is 29.1%: https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/10/13/record-breaking-quarter-ca...
It may rebound back to these levels due to the gas price increase, and many car manufacturers slashing their prices to compensate for the subsidy ending.
That number you quote was from the fourth quarter of 2025. EV tax benefits expired in the third quarter of 2025. People who were on the fence all bought during the third quarter. The market share was 29.1%.
https://cleantechnica.com/2025/10/13/california-reaches-29-1...
I assume people are worried about former "we have 12 years before doom" people, having all converted into "burn Teslas" people, destroying some of the best electric cars on the planet.
Anyone who lives in an apartment or condo will have a difficult time charging an EV in CA.
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When you see the U.S Government making near daily public statements with the intended effect of calming markets and the public.... It's time to be worried. A.K.A when the government says "everything is going to be ok, don't worry we got this under control" that's when shit is bad. This is what we have been seeing. It seems we are near a tipping point now.
Well, things can be bad because they are inherently bad, or things can be bad because people are panicking, and panicking people react in ways that make situations worse.
Saying "it's going to be OK" doesn't change any circumstances. But it may reduce the level of panic (depending on how much the people trust the government), and that can in fact change the way the circumstances evolve.
Soon gas stations in the Bay Area will have to price Gasoline in quarts, because the gas pumps can only display up to $9.99.
In the previous 2022 gas price spike, some stations could not dispense more than $100 worth of gas since that would previously indicate something wrong with the station.
Maybe this would be a good time to switch to metric system and use liters
That'll confuse the average driver. The number of people that know the various measurements for fluids is not that high. I can totally see some future social media posts excited about the $2.99 price and then getting upset when the pump shows .25 gallons.
Even if you know the measurements it would be confusing to see a sign say $2.99 for gas and it turn out to be for a quart and not a gallon when you pull up. It's assumed at this point that it's per gallon.
I'm a bit perplexed on this one-- Yes, we refine our own blend of gasoline, but it's based on market oil -- nothing about the war we started with Iran impacts our domestic refining capability.
Also, oil takes longer to get from Iran to the west coast than to the east coast. Shouldn't the east coast be the first to notice decreased shipments, because the west coast essentially has a stock still in transit for longer?
EDIT: Nevermind, now I see that 25% of CA gas is refined overseas.
CA’s requirement that it gets its own blend of gas is combined with how its openly hostile towards its ever decreasing refineries and that it is impossible for a new refinery to ever open makes it’s supplies absurdly limited
People in LA need to breathe during the summer time. So yes we demand a blend that protects our residents. And the refiners are choosing to close refineries. They are not being compelled.
They are being strangled, it’s their choice to tap out is how I would put it.
The improvement in air quality is due to the clean air act, catalytic converters, and the shuttering of industry, the gas blend plays a minor part. Even then, with gas so much higher it will materially make peoples lives worse, at some point society would be better off getting rid of the blend.
Yeah, I remember flying into LAX in the late 80s and early 90s. Smog so thick it looked like a physical obstacle.
Whatever they're doing seems to be working nicely.
Car emissions are far lower now. I lived in CA when the air was grey in July.
That ended a long time ago. A modern Honda generates something like 1% as much pollution as a car from the eighties.
It's bonkers that some of the most expensive gas you'll ever buy is in SF, and Martinez is right there. You could bike there, if they allowed bikes on the bridge.
I paid the equivalent of $12.50 a gallon for diesel at the peak price a month or so ago.
> CA’s requirement that it gets its own blend of gas is combined with how its openly hostile towards its ever decreasing refineries and that it is impossible for a new refinery to ever open makes it’s supplies absurdly limited
A big one is a lack of pipelines.
As I understand it, California sits on so much oil, nobody has built a pipeline.
Building an energy pipeline in California is like bringing sand to the beach. The energy is already there.
There are plenty of crude oil and refined product pipelines in California.
For example crude oil is produced mid state in the San Joaquin valley and pumped by pipeline to the Bay Area and LA refineries.
Refined product from LA is delivered by pipeline from LA refineries as far east as Phoenix and up to Las Vegas.
Building new pipelines in California though is…challenging.
California learned that lesson the hard way. Have you been in the city during a bad smog day?
Everyone loves gas and hates refineries. It's a tough choice.
Weirdly California doesn't get all of its gas from domestic refining.
https://timesofsandiego.com/state-region/2026/04/23/prices-c...
"California’s top foreign refinery supplier of gasoline and blendstocks this decade is Reliance Industries Ltd.’s Jamnagar refinery complex in western India. "
"More than 9 million barrels arrived via this loophole in 2025"
Now, that's a tiny fraction of the 320M barrels of gas used in CA annually, but anything that affects global oil shipments will be felt in California.
2 refineries in California were closed over the last 2 years leading to a 17% reduction in total refining capacity.
Per the article, the type of fuel needed by California standards is produced at refineries in India, South Korea and Washington.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65704
... because demand is down. California hit peak gas sales 20 years ago and reaching zero motor fuel sales is foreseeable.
Reaching zero motor fuel sales is foreseeable? By when do you foresee it?
How much below the peak is current sales?
15% in absolute terms, 22% in per capita terms. And it is state policy to allow no more additional ICE cars in less than ten years, no net emissions in less than 20 years. Investing in a refinery today would obviously be folly.
Interesting. I thought the USA secured cuban oil to prepare for the fallout of the iran war. Was that not enough?
Venezuelan, not Cuban.
And what they secured (if they secured anything) was basically future. It's going to take years to ramp Venezuelan production back up to what it would be with decent management.
Fox News isn't real news and shouldn't be taken seriously.
Didn't California shut down 2 high capacity refineries in the last couple of years?
The capitalists who own them shut them down.
But this guy is fixated on the fact that 17% of the refineries were closed in a state where gas sales fell 17%.
Governments have gotten in the bad habit of acting like nothing will ever go wrong. Living paycheck-to-paycheck, so to speak. Cali not the only one suffering this fate. It doesnt matter if it's Trump's fault or not. Lets just say it is. Bad things happen. You have to be ready.
> Bad things happen. You have to be ready.
You're not wrong, but also how "ready" is "ready enough"? What about things the US doesn't generally have access to? Rare earth minerals? Helium? Cobalt? Coffee?
It also costs money to build the infra for storage and more money to maintain. There's always a trade-off. I think governments have done an acceptable job of being ready, but they are predicated on the assumption that the global order that the developed world has largely enjoyed for several decades remains largely intact.
It's a bad assumption in hindsight because some folks chose to go over a cliff over fixing deep-seated problems. You can't really control for chaos.
Moving to green and nuclear energy, pressing hard to upgrade the national grid would be the obvious things to reduce our short-term dependence on fossil fuels.
Energy independence is not a pipe dream, and it isn't ever going to be 100%. We should be working toward it.
We may be somewhat dependent on China or other sources for solar panels, for example, but once we have the product, it has a multi-decade lifetime compared to an instantly-consumed fuel.
Even if you're a fossil fuel fanatic, one should be advocating for more of our refineries to be tooled for processing our own crude oil. But that isn't as profitable in the short term, so we don't do it.
P.S. politically, we've seen our system does not have the capacity to deal with a malicious executive taking total control of the government. We need a complete rebuild of our legislative and executive branches.
Surely an example of being ready would be to electrify everything?
The rest of the developed world is banning ICE car sales, meanwhile the US is scrapping its wind farms, because doing it trolls the left.
Not just scrapping them - literally paying foreign companies billions of dollars to not build wind farms. Illegally as well, there’s absolutely no authority for these payments to happen outside of Congress.
We were fully warned of this with the supply chain disruption of covid.
Global supply chain has become dangerously dependent upon a stable geopolitical environment that has been unnaturally provided by the United States for the last near 100 years in post world war II.
This unipolar naval supremacy is not a normal situation. One of the things that triggered world war I was an escalating arms race in battleships between Germany and Great Britain.
I would recommend the United States practically every country, Force its automobile manufacturers to go very hardcore down the plugin hybrid electric vehicle, which will maximize the battery supply to electrify the largest amount of daily consumer transportation.
I would say you should impose a minimum of 40 to 50 mi for an all-electric range, The 20 mile range which is degraded to really about 12 now is not sufficient in my four phev.
Hybrids also weighs far less gasoline and idling and low torque low RPM situations like stop and go and sitting in traffic jams, by utilizing gener of breaking, using the electric motor for the 0-25 acceleration that ICE engines are incredibly inefficient at.
It's my opinion that the equipment and manufacturing switchover should be much less of an imposition on car manufacturers than the full EV switchover. Consumers do not have such a shocking switch to driving habits because a phev just functions like a normal ICE car if the battery drains, it solves long-range transportation issues and concerns with EVs.
Most car manufacturers know how to make turbocharged high efficiency compact engines, most major manufacturers I believe know how to use Atkinson cycle with variable valve timing combined with a hybrid drivetrain to further boost gas efficiency
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> The President isn't to blame.
I mean, there's a lot of blame to go around, but tearing up a working deal that gave us unprecedented, multilateral access to Iran's nuclear facilities, and then later jumping into a war of choice with no clear objectives and seemingly being surprised by the most obvious geopoltical realities that people with any shred of a clue have been talking about for DECADES would seem to have at least something to do with the current mess.
In my book, the silver lining is that this might finally push the world to move away from fossil fuels in a meaningful way.
Yeah but he wouldn't have been in the position to do any of that if the people who funded his campaign like the Adelsons, Kushners, Musk, Linda McMahon, Lutnick and so forth didn't contribute millions to his campaign and leverage whatever other resources they have to promote him.
And they in turn couldn't do any of that if the teams of professionals from lawyers, accountants to engineers didn't help them acquire and use those resources.
Just like violent crime is overwhelmingly perpetuated by a handful of repeat offenders we see the same pattern in white collar crime. A handful of white collar criminals cause damage to American society that cascades through the world resulting in food and fuel shortages that we're talking about.
I get that it's really hard but you have to view this dispassionately and from a systems thinking perspective. The professionals and oligarchs are responsible for the mad king scenario that we're all living through right now. They're responsible for the social decay that affects us daily.
And it's just going to keep getting worse and worse once the mad king eventually goes the way all mad kings do.
I don't disagree with that, but it seems kind of like a acute cause/proximate cause sort of distinction to me.
That, and I don't forgive the general populace either.
He started the war!
This is being downvoted, but it's correct. President is the symptom of the problem, not the cause.
Correct, he is the symptom of the problem created by himself.
The Iran nuclear deal rode off the back of Stuxnet and concessions were easier with that damage. The recent strikes with the B2 were largely ineffectual so well done.
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> California leaders have done everything they possibly can to chase refiners out of state
The refiners are running out of crude. Having more refiners wouldn’t solve the problem.
There's plenty of crude oil in CA. Certainly enough for California's needs, in fact.
> There's plenty of crude oil in CA. Certainly enough for California's needs
California has 1.7 billion barrels of proven reserves [1] and imports 373 million barrels a year [2]. That's 5 years of imports in the ground. (At current rates, California depletes its proven reserves in 2040.)
[1] https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=R...
[2] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
that is not my understanding or what is implied in the article. where would i go to find this fact?
Also that poster forgot LA smog of yore!
This is a good reason to move our infrastructure further off of being dependent on a highly volatile region actually.
How about just ditching this disgusting use of a finite resource and switch to an infinitely abundant resource?
There’s this crazy thing that happens where you need to use carbon to decarbonize.
Solar panels are made in factories where energy and inputs are cheaper and then shipped on diesel cargo ships to the rest of the world.
Our cars run on gas, so we need new electric ones, but the ships and car carriers are themselves… not electric yet.
Because energy is more expensive, everything is more expensive, including electrification.
People will blame climate policy on this but this is evidence that we've failed to move off our fossil fuel dependency.
Texas is better at this because they don't restrict solar with “enviromental” nimby lawsuits.
Nor have restrictions on refining oil or require a special blend of gasoline. It does seem strange to call out Texas as doing something right environmentally.
We've had decades to do something about it, but if Trump deciding to step into a completely unnecessary war and blundering the entire thing is what makes everyone wake up then I guess that's a silver lining.
4D chess baby. He's a genius. All of his oil investing friends think so.
He's the best, the best at everything. Including tanking the world economy...
It is funny that propaganda has somehow convinced conservatives, people who used to idealize self reliance and independence from government dependencies, to move away from solar and EVs.
A EV and a home solar setup with a large battery bank, is the ultimate in self reliance.
I remember even 10 years ago you'd see the occasional right leaning homesteader talking about the benefits of being off grid with a solar setup.
Now days removing our dependencies on foreign powers is somehow a liberal conspiracy. O_o
A bicycle and moderate fitness is the ultimate in self-reliance but you never heard them promoting that either.
Bicycle doesn't carry a family of 4, or carry loads of dirt or pick up lumber or tow a trailer.
Also my e-bike needs more maintenance than my EV. Go figure.
carry a family of 4 where? if you rely on that other location exisiting, you are not self-reliant.
tow a trailer where? see above.
Pick up a load of dirt or lumber-- how did those materials get to the pick-up point?
And the road you are driving on, where did it come from?
Being conservative doesn't mean I don't want roads or businesses to exist.
I was very pleasantly surprised at how much my single cargo e-bike can handle. It is big, nearly the size of a tandem bike, but it served me well for 5 years of not having a car.
Curious about your maintenance needs. I have a guy that comes out once a year for service and tunes it up for me. After 3 years, I replaced the chain. I've upgraded to hydraulic brakes by the same guy. Other than that, it's been smooth riding. Or are you saying your EV needs so little maintenance that even the low maintenance on a bike seem high?
I haven't had to do any work on my EV in the 2 years I've had it.
I'm due for a cabin air filter change in another couple years.
So yes the bike is costing me more in maintenance! It is hard to compete with 0.
Does the eBike have a monthly payment plus a required insurance policy? The EV still costs way more to own which is the most important factor
Maintenance should be amortized. The first time you do brakes and tires it will cost more than 5+ years of ebike maintenance. It adds nothing to the conversation to pretend otherwise.
>carry a family of 4
Why are you carrying them? They should be self-reliant too.
It does carry a family of 4 in a lot of places. I've seen entire clothing stores set up on bicycles in places like Thailand.
2 bicycles can.
I'm conservative and own an EV and ICE truck. I know many conservatives with Tesla's. I have solar and a propane generator as backups.
I think the propaganda would be whatever said we're all against it, that's untrue. We just want both, no gas bans.
Conservative bots are out strong in Pacific NW forums slop posting against new "green energy" energy projects. Blaming the (not yet built!) green energy projects for upcoming rate increases.
Nevermind that solar is why Texas has such cheap electricity prices.
> no gas bans.
I'm all for the free market.
Price into gas the expected increase in healthcare costs due to air and ground water pollution. Stop subsidizing it for non-critical uses.
Same for extra tire dust from EVs (that shit is toxic AF).
Right now I see astroturfing that EVs are why our electricity infrastructure is overloaded (rather than blaming 50 years of neglect), or that the cars burst into flame (no more than other cars and newer battery tech not any more).
Subsidizing EVs is interesting because it is obvious that EVs are the future (battery tech gets ~6% better year over year, compounding, ICE designs haven't seen improvements in decades), but recent removal of government support caused American car companies to basically give up on anything except the domestic car market, which spells their long term doom (which the Ford CEO has pretty much come out and admitted.)
There's already like 90c of gasoline tax in California and some of the highest auto registration fees, and that's on top of other rules that make it more expensive.
The gasoline and registration taxes pay for (most of the cost of) the roads. Change them all to toll roads and we can get rid of those taxes.
Somehow other states don't need to make them all toll roads, and their roads are better
the entire economy of California being dependent on how Iran is feeling on a given day is crazy work
Who do you think started the current war?
This is oversimplifying war. Whoever struck first isn't necessarily the one who created the conflict.
In this case it is.
I don't know, can see this either way. Iran's leadership has been stating for decades that they want to destroy Israel. They've been funding militias who launch rockets at Israel, during times when Israel wasn't threatening Iran's existence in any way. They were launching rockets just before this war started. But US pulled out of nuclear deal and killed Iranian leaders during first Trump administration, and has been meddling with Iran for decades.
All I'll say for sure is the US shouldn't be involved, and shouldn't have taken such a one-sided approach during Israel's founding. None of this benefits us, we simply have traitors in our government.
Iran did, by killing over 1000 Americans over the last 47 years.
So what, how many Iranians did the US kill?
The US is an exporter of oil, so no US state will run out.
However, you do pay the market price.
Yes it is a net exporter of oil, but not oil for gasoline. The use is a net importer of oil used for gasoline. That's because oil companies have chosen to not make the investments needed to refine domestic oil. We have to import for that.
The article mentions that California no longer is. Due to closures it is now a net importer of oil.
Sure, I'm trying to say that the US is not dependent on oil from the middle east, it produces a lot by itself
CA mandates its own blend which it is dependent on imports for
California is very poorly connected to the rest of the country in terms of pipelines https://www.bts.gov/sites/bts.dot.gov/files/2021-03/U.S.%20P...
Yeah especially given that California is a leader in renewable energy sources.
Renewables is for electricity. Oil is used for a lot of things that electricity can't replace, or not yet
Much of what fossil fuels are used for is to refine fossil fuels, a use that we don't need to entirely replace.
Yes, but even the renewables market is dependent on petroleum-based transport and infrastructure.
But the more renewables get used the less true that is.
Possibly, or more infrastructure is needed to support the growing demand for renewables, and the equipment is often trucked around using standard freight (large trucks or airplanes), concrete trucks to pour slabs, etc.
Electric trucks are rapidly becoming a thing. And even if not, more trucks delivering equipment for renewables get balanced out by more EVs.
Not to mention natural gas and oil will always need to be shipped around. Whereas when you have enough renewables and a grid that can supply enough electricity, shipping panels and batteries drops by a lot.
Yes, and I look forward to when electric freight is a thing, but I do think it's an overstatement to say they are "rapidly becoming a thing". Articles about electric trucks among the HN crowd make it feel that way, but those are tests that don't really reflect what's happening in the market. (Most of the available data puts the overall percentage of freight moved by renewables at less than 0.1%). I suspect we're 10-20 years away from a time when a majority of DC chargers, solar panels, or wind turbines are transported using something other than gasoline or diesel.
Don't get me wrong, I'm quite dogmatic about renewables (we have 2 EVs, pay more for various renewable options, aggressively recycle, avoid single-use plastics, etc). I'm just pragmatic in my outlook.
Isn’t it more dependent on how Trump is feeling? That makes it much more depressing for the leader of the country to be messing with our largest economy like this.
I began assuming long ago that Trump is just manipulating markets. Like my finances are managed under that assumption.