ExxonMobil’s preliminary third-quarter update has put refining front and center for investors. Higher refining margins are expected to add roughly $4.5 billion to downstream earnings compared with the second quarter—on top of the $4.1 billion the company already generated from refining in Q2. That surge comes even as upstream earnings face an estimated $1.3 billion […]
Continue Reading
On Thursday, the International Energy Agency agreed to accelerate the release of more than 20 million barrels of diesel, with no timeline. By our math, that is about 17 hours of world demand, or five days of U.S. use. Emergency barrels help, but they do not build refineries. – The key is whether they actually […]
Continue Reading
Diesel is $6.30 a gallon, $2.64 more than a year ago. The International Energy Agency now says the world’s diesel shortage runs “well into 2027.” We checked three clocks, the futures market, the government forecast and the IEA, to estimate how long $6 diesel can hang on, and who pays while it does. Our answer, […]
Continue Reading
Crude is moving again through the Strait of Hormuz. The fuel Americans actually buy is not. That is the gap David Blackmon flags in his October 7 Forbes piece, “Oil Is Flowing Again But Gasoline, Diesel Prices Aren’t Cooperating,” and the data behind it explain why pump prices remain stuck near records even as headlines […]
Continue Reading
Russell Hardy did not wake up on October 6 and decide to scare a room full of energy executives. He runs Vitol, the biggest independent oil trader on the planet, and he was describing what his people are actually seeing when they try to move barrels. The seven-month war involving the United States, Israel, and […]
Continue Reading
A worldwide diesel crunch, driven by wartime disruptions, is giving fresh political momentum to Brazil’s state oil company Petrobras and its long-debated push for greater domestic refining. The same supply tightness is exposing the United States’ own refining constraints—constraints that have accumulated for decades and are heavily concentrated in states with stricter environmental rules. In […]
Continue Reading
Global electricity demand is growing faster than the grids that have to carry it. The constraint is no longer just generation. It is the hardware that steps voltage up and down—large power transformers and the related substation gear—and the industrial base that used to build them. The International Energy Agency’s Electricity 2026 report puts global […]
Continue Reading
The White House’s decision this week to step back from a blunt 90-day diesel export ban is one of the most important energy-security signals of 2026. Record pump prices invited a political shortcut. The administration, led by Energy Secretary Chris Wright, instead chose the harder and more honest path: keep the refining system running and […]
Continue Reading
A diesel export ban is the kind of policy that polls well and trades poorly. With the AAA national average at about $6.53 a gallon as of September 22, 2026 — a record — and California well above $8, the political impulse is obvious: keep more barrels at home. That impulse misunderstands how U.S. refining […]
Continue Reading
Energy News Beat | September 18, 2026JPMorgan’s commodities desk just did something Wall Street almost never does in public. It took the baseline off the table. In the September 17 Oil Markets Weekly note, titled “Dry powder,” Natasha Kaneva, Lyuba Savinova, and Artem Fakhredtinov wrote the line that has been circulating all day: “For the […]
Continue Reading