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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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The United States is not short of crude oil. It is short of spare refining capacity, spare distillate inventory, and spare time. Diesel is the pressure point. National retail diesel is printing all-time highs near $6.40 a gallon. California is above $8.30. Midwest pump prices are breaking state records after ExxonMobil’s Joliet refinery in Illinois […]
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The 7-1-1 Board of Supervisors vote directs staff to draft a resolution for a later October vote, with a proposed retroactive effective date of September 15. Officials emphasized it is not a legal moratorium under Virginia’s Dillon Rule, but a temporary pause on board-level reviews while Phase 2 data-center standards are completed. Board Chair Phyllis […]
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Commercial crude oil inventories excluding the SPR fell 640,000 barrels to 423.4 million barrels. That was a third consecutive weekly draw, but smaller than Wall Street expected. Analysts in a Wall Street Journal survey had looked for a 1.4 million-barrel decline. Commercial crude is now about 1% above the five-year average for this time of […]
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