Speaking to a forum hosted by the Economist in New York, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright explained that banning the export of diesel fuel will do nothing to impact the price of diesel fuel and would, eventually, raise the price.
The reasoning is simple.
“The blunt tool of banning diesel exports definitely doesn’t work,” Wright said. “If you can’t export the diesel that comes out of our refineries, you run out of places to store it, and you have to reduce US refining, which would put upward pressure on gasoline prices and jet fuel prices,” Wright said.
The part that Wright didn’t say is the component of price that is entirely detached from supply/demand. The pump price is determined by market speculators, commodity traders and multinational financial interests. That “market price” has nothing to do with the amount of diesel in the inventory.
Restricting exports, a process that ends with restricting production, only gives the speculators and traders a justification to project higher prices. The USA ends up swimming in diesel fuel as the pump price climbs to $15/gal.
If you want to end the disconnection of supply to price, you have to do what Russia does. Sell outside the “market price” at the production cost + profit margin.
In the “west” it’s a rigged game; but be careful. The DSA crowd wants to change the game’s outcome by changing the referees who can then ban/control the players.
Trump’s MAGAnomic approach changes the rulebook of the game completely and is more in line with Putin (BRICS).
George Carlin previously explained it.
Sorry, no. Prices will go down before the Midterms. It will happen.
After the 90 days, it will go back up.
And what EXACTLY will cause prices to go down? Please elaborate.
Because market speculators, commodity traders and multinational financial interests support Trump’s agenda in the midterms?
Matt is one of those useful types….
Cool, let’s bookmark this 🙂
Create more storage in the USA. Create more detachment from the game the speculators play. China did it and are able to weather the storm better than us.
Since we don’t have a supply problem….at all…..how is your idea going to help prices??
We have supply but need more storage, and also some more refining capability.
China has been able to weather Venezuela and the Iran war, even though they are huge importers of Iranian oil, because of their massive storage and reserves. Reserves allow you to disconnect from the game of the globalists in the same way having a several year cash/US Treasuries reserve account helps a retired individual through market downturns, allowing them to not be forced to sell their investments at a loss during downturns.
America First means immunizing ourselves from international market fluctuations through our own manufacturing capabilities as well as keeping a significant inventory of critical supplies and materials.
Everything you say, is for now. Same as we could say, or the President says about dropping gas prices because of Venezuela and technology in Middle Eastern countries.
All of this is a wait and see prospect………
We make it and theres no more room in the fridge….we need another fridge…
We need increased REFINING ABILITY worse than anything. Thank the earth worshipping Climate Change Cult for us not having it.
Ideally, individuals or co-ops would buy processors and make their own diesel. As little as $20K for a machine depending on quantity needed and timeline. The per gallon price would be less than $4. You just need a source for vegetable oil (new or used) and that’s often tied up in contracts between restaurants and recyclers, but not impossible to procure.
Unfortunately gasoline is much more refined and complicated so that’s not an option.
Ideally and reality are two different things.
The reality is large renewable facilities such as the ones in CA Bay Area not only scoop up most of the plant oils and animal fat feedstocks using global contracts for palm oils, tallow, used cooking oils, etc. but are only profitable when government credits are taken into account (as in several dollars of tax credits / gallon). Additionally, because of multiple large “renewables” facilities going online in the past few years, the price of biobased feedstocks has skyrocketed. This requires even more government tax credits to break even unless you have large customers with internal corporate mandates to use a certain quantity of renewable fuels each year.
If you want to purchase new vegetable oils then you have to deal with Big Ag. I think Sundance has provided sufficient insight into that monopoly to cause one to think very carefully about dealing with the devil and trading acreage for more vegetable oils and taking acreage away from food production.
Now finally, there is a huge cost incurred before you ever get to sell a gallon of fuel. You have to scientifically prove that your bio-based diesel is either molecularly identical to a fuel that the US EPA has already approved for commerce or you must do all of the necessary scientific studies to prove to the EPA you can safely place you product on the market. These costs and the associated paperwork will only take a few years to complete if you are lucky and have a few million dollars set aside specifically for this use.
Been there, done that and unfortunately have the ulcer to prove it.
I’m talking about personal, private use or maybe with a small group of friends/farmers. Not retail sales. Making 50 gallons per batch, per week or something like that using Springboard Biodiesels equipment. Getting fryer oil from the local burger joint (DQ), or other small resources in your town.
The US is exporting excess diesel.
Yes, exporting it because they can’t store it or refine it.
Slowly: We are exporting bc we can’t store all that we are refining. If storage is the issue, say so and I’ll agree.
per AI:
No, the ExxonMobil Joliet Refinery was not fully back online as of September 23, 2026, nearly one week after its shutdown.
The refinery went offline on September 13, 2026, due to a power outage that triggered a plant-wide shutdown. The disruption has removed approximately 11 million gallons per day of gasoline and diesel from the Midwest market, contributing to regional fuel price surges.
Yes….Newsom shut down 2 refineries in California just to appease to those Green New Deal cultists.
Even if you had the billions $$$ that would take, you don’t have the time BEFORE the elections. The price is being manipulated by people who want the price to hurt. When has diesel EVER been $2 more than gasoline? There’s no historic precedent. When it’s no longer useful, the high prices will come down. Right after the elections. Especially if Democrats win, so they can erroneously take the credit.
I’m talking long term, not in relation to a single election.
Got it. But if we don’t win the midterms it’s very possible America will never be the same. Trump gets impeached. MAGA is roadblocked. Crazytown returns again. I don’t think most Americans have the fortitude for the required revolution. There’s not going to be another Trump.
Been thinking about the disastrous outcome if the Dims are able to steal the midterms. At some point when the globalists and leftists think they’ve regained power will be about the time 100+ million gun owners will call BS and refuse to comply
China has been adding tank space that can hold diesel, especially at independent (“teapot”) refineries and new terminals, yet the large, well-documented buildout of the last two years is almost entirely crude oil storage, not finished diesel.
I believe the answer is to build more refineries. That seems to be the chokepoint. And build them to process US oil. Right now it all gets shipped around.
Sure. That’ll give the anti-USA saboteurs even more juicy critical targets to blow up and set of fire.
Provided they don’t become targets themselves like the people in the drug boats.
Sabotage is more often than not carried out covertly.
As such the perps cannot be readily identified because they’re long gone when the actual explosion occurs or fire begins. Or they use third party patsies who are contracted thru unidentifiable intermediaries.
Drug boats are live real time operations that cannot hide and are easily discoverable. Entirely different logistics.
Diesel degrade in storage – need to factor that!
Keeps longer than that gasoline ethanol blend does at least.
George Carlin was a wise man ahead of the times.
Yes, he was, so was Orwell and Rand.
Lets not forget that the same commodities mentality exists for our food supply as well.
Exactly.
The US does NOT have a supply problem with diesel. That’s why there is so much for export.
Whoever in the Trump Administration that floated this stupid idea needs to be fired.
I think they were responding to outside knee jerk demands (social media for example) that exports be banned.
Love the Carlin skit. Seen it several times and it only gets more prescient with time. Language is rough but can’t argue with his interpretation of events.
“Language is rough but can’t argue with his interpretation of events.”
Polite language is not always appropriate when describing impolite people.
We were told the fuel storage tanks ARE empty. Let’s build up the storage, the price will drop and demand will increase within the USA. If we get full storage then allow staged exports.
The National Petroleum Reserve storage tanks on the Gulf of America coast are for crude oil, not refined diesel, gasoline, kerosene or heating oil. The tanks are underground salt caves and you can only pump back out of them at a certain rate and then send the crude to the nearby refineries for processing.
There are limits on storage for refined products at the sites.
The U.S. Reserve is close to a set draw down limit on pulling reserves from it. 285 million barrels of cruse oil as of today.
When full its at a limit 714 million barrels of crude oil.
Big club or Big tent.
So accurate and George spelled that out about 30 years ago, maybe longer.
🎯
sDee, you’re welcome. 😊
folks are listening 🙂
So how do you get the prices down? It better happen soon as this could drag our chances down in the mid-terms.
On the first Wednesday after the first Tuesday in November, a switch will be pulled, phone calls will be made, texts will be sent, and globalists will nod in agreement: lower the prices!!!
So close all commodity markets. Make it illegal.
lol, are you wanting to collapse the commodity markets or just being facetious?
Sounds drastic. Then you go with government price controls?
Instead, we should limit commodity trading to those that actually produce or use the product. Kick out the speculators and the City of London.
Actually Scott Bessent already said the US Treasury could choke off all of the globalists money now that he’s tracked the illegal money flows that were keeping Iran in the anti-Trump game. His reservation in doing that was that it could cause a global financial meltdown.
Imho, it is not so much the “Commodity market”, in and of itself, as it is the regulations written to benefit those who would manipulate said market.
…
“Evil lurks in the datalinks as it lurked in the streets of yesteryear. But it was never the streets that were evil.”
Sister Miriam Godwinson
Sid Meier’s
“Alpha Centauri”
…
“2. The shift to cash settlement
Originally, futures contracts resulted in the physical delivery of the commodity. This changed in the 1970s with the introduction of cash settlement.
Rather than delivering the physical goods, cash is exchanged based on the price difference between the futures contract price and the market price at expiration. This allows participation from speculators and investors.”
https://www.markets.com/education-centre/commodity-markets
…
17 CFR Appendix C to Part 38 – Demonstration of Compliance That a Contract Is Not Readily Susceptible to Manipulation
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/17/appendix-C_to_part_38
.Huh????
A better solution is to break the big companies up into smaller pieces. More innovation and Competition. The prices can be set company to company. AntiTrust enforcement and Price Collusion can be combatted by the Government.
Unless there is full collusion among the traders in the market, it seems like a market-based price would always be the lowest. If the game is that rigged, to whom is all the excess money going and why hasn’t anybody reported on the massive scam being perpetrated on the citizens? And how is Maganomics going to change the system? More background and explanation please.
I understand that folks what to believe what they want to believe because they can’t accept reality. But, you can’t blame that your tires are flat on your vehicle because someone stuck a knife in them, when you’re neighbor’s surveillance system clearly shows you puncturing your own tires.
Sorry, if I traded markets based on opinions, instead of making $$$ everyday, I’d be liquidating my assets and end up living on the streets.
Nope. The City of London speculators and insurers (Lloyds) control the price. The actual true price of oil is what Russia charges to India – based on production and shipping costs. As Sundance points out, global commodity trading is why orange juice costs the same in Minneapolis as it does in Florida. Collusion? You bet.
Consumer free market pricing works for the most part. If the price of orange juice becomes too high then people stop buying it.
Diesel is different though because it is used to transport products and has a force multiplier on pricing in a way. Your orange juice is going up because of diesel prices. Everything we consume in the US abd the world for that matter relies on diesel fueled transportation at some point.
True. Diesel affects the price of everything that travels by train or truck.
One reason free market pricing works is spoilage. You can bet oranges or orange juice would go on sale if people stopped buying it and warehouses were about to throw away tons of product. Expiration dates.
Unfortunately diesel can sit around for weeks and months (especially if treated with preservatives) so there’s no downward pressure. At least not before the midterms. And drivers would have to stick to a boycott. Highly improbable. Professional drivers aren’t going to quit their jobs. Consumers only account for 20-25% of diesel fuel sales.
Well if all or the vast majority of traders hate Trump or love globalism (not that far fetched) it’s not hard to see how they can control the prices. Virtually full collusion. The media hates Trump, so they aren’t going to expose anything.
The profits (“excess money”) is making a very small class of Wall Street types very rich. Why would they stop?
You’d need a Conservative, patriotic group of investors to build a refinery and a distribution network large enough to cause enough competition (lost sales) to bring down prices and be willing to do that for minimum profit.
And it would take years and Democrats would do their best to block permitting and approvals.
We are a divided nation. They hate us.
And if a Democrat were in the White House, they would just arrest you for some made-up crime, and your arresting officer would be an illegal alien with a badge and gun.
Insert Brussels, City of London, Davos and the Rules Based Order.
You forgot “into the woodchippers” after “Rules Based Order”
Just a piss hole in the snow.
Ah yes, the classic George Carlin explanation of the US government and the “free” market system.
Carlin was aware of the corporatism or the rise of corporate fascism well before most.
Old enough to remember when lots of “conservative GOP” bloggers would call you out if you rightly placed blame of events on Wall Street or mega corporations.
Just not ready to have “Gov’t” dictate the price of anything, especially oil. The distortions on the supply side are already caused by Gov’t (war, sanctions, regulations that prevent pipelines and refineries and storage tanks from being built, etc).
Look at Pharma as another place where Gov’t effs up pricing by being too involved.
Were such machinations with gas/diesel prices happening under Biden? I only ask bc I remember the Dems making the claim of price gouging. This seems like a similar claim. To be clear, I understand they are different claims (not trying to claim Sundance is a Dem haha) just trying to
Understand why this is different, why Biden was culpable, why Trump isn’t, etc
“Were such machinations with gas/diesel prices happening under Biden?”
Biden’s policies, both economic and social, were such disasters that he wound up raiding the petroleum reserve in an attempt to hold prices. “Holding prices” is another way of saying “winning elections.” As with everything else Biden related, reality was glossed over by our complicit media as we the people were being too distracted by the rest of the circus clowns to bother taking notice.
I will repeat: George Carlin was wrong!!!
The number of people in the club is in fact extremely tiny!
The people in the club, however, do believe that they are “big.”
But even so, they are morally and spiritually at Zero!
Increasingly markets look like a casino, where the house has rigged all the wheels and marked all the cards in the casino’s favor.
“Free markets” in the Adam-Smith sense seem to be a rarity.
Free markets like many things in US history were based on a honest society. A man’s word was his bond.
Honor hardly exists anymore. Society is now get what you can while you can in any way.
“We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”
C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
“Free markets like many things in US history were based on a honest society.”
Reminds me of this:
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other” – John Adams
If you choose to define big as number of members, then you are correct. If you define big as number of dollars represented, then Carlin is correct.
I thought these multinational commodity firms like ADM, Cargill, Bunge, and Louis Dreyfus had market power and could influence prices, but ultimately were constrained by supply and demand. They buy and sell to maximize profit of course, which means they respond to, rather than dictate, market prices.
This post by Sundance in a previous thread should be taken into account here.
sundance (@sundance)
September 23, 2026 1:24 pm
Reply to L4Grasshopper.
“You first have to stop or erase your historic contexts and start over. It’s not an individual trader issue. AI now has algorithmic bots to act as thousands of traders simultaneously speculating. Those thousands are actually one person.“
I wonder what George Carlin would be saying now. Truly missed.
The argument is a barrel of Crude Oil is refined into 46% gasoline, 30% distillate oil (diesel fuel & heating oils), 11% jet fuel (kerosene a) and the rest into propane, coke, asphalt oil, residual oil and other solvents.
The US cracks the crude oil into these products, uses some, and exports the rest. If we block the export of diesel, then we have to store it somewhere, but the current infrastructure is optimized for exporting. Yes, the US is very good at refining, so good that we buy other countries’ crude just to process it and sell the products.
The argument above is that without a massive expansion in specifically diesel storage, we would run out of places to put it at the rate that we make it as a byproduct. We have to crack the crude to get the gasoline. The US produces 5.2 million barrels of diesel distillates per day, and exports about 1.6 million per day.
The EIA says there are about 107 million barrels of distillates in the US supply today, and we peaked at 177 million barrels storage in 2020, and 186 million back in 1982. At 180ish, we have 73 million available storage. At 73/1.6, we have about 46 days of storage on hand, at which place there’s no place to put the diesel in the US. That doesn’t even get us to the Nov elections. We can’t even fill out contracts in 1.5 months much less build storage at this scale.
And when we fill it, refiners have to stop making diesel, which means they stop making gasoline. And that is when all chaos breaks loose.
So while economics says prices would go down in the very short run, we would see other oil products increase to compensate. There simply isn’t enough storage in the system to handle a total ban on exports.
Thanks for this post. All of this is way over my head and most people just want to point the finger at some boogeyman hiding in the shadows.
I want hard factual data that makes sense.
Thanks very much for the information and explanation.
In trying to understand this circumstance, it seems to be what the host has said. It’s not a fuel or storage problem/shortage. We have fuel to export and there are no tankers lined up to distribute overage to the nation.
Fuel waits in storage to go to the highest price point?
I’m ignorant of the commodities game, but do these market prices reflect actual contractual agreements with scheduled delivery dates that cannot be canceled?
So if someone is locked into taking delivery in November at $10/gal while at the same time the current “market” in November is at $4/gal, isn’t that delivery taker going to somehow get financially crushed?
What happens is a trader goes onto a platform like ICE, and makes a bid to buy at a price they are willing to pay, for delivery in a forward month (in units of 1000 barrels / 42000 gallons). If the seller is willing to sell at that price (the ask), the market matches and facilitates the contract, and you now own the right to take delivery at the price you bid.
https://www.ice.com/products/72643664/Heating-Oil-Outright—NYH-ULSD-Future
Right now, we are in “backwardization” ; the price in the spot/next month is much higher than forward months. This means if you need delivery now, you are paying a much higher price than if you do nothing and wait.
Spot / October 2026 ~$4.84 – $4.91
November 2026 ~$4.62 – $4.73
December 2026 ~$4.50 – $4.51
January 2027 ~$4.36 – $4.37
Once you have the contract, you can re-sell your right to the diesel to someone else, as long as you do it before the delivery month. So yes, you can lose money if you overpaid, but that just meant you paid more earlier than if you waited. Maybe having that contract in hand was worth it to your business; you didn’t know a month ago if diesel was going to continue to climb. And you just pass your wholesale cost onto the customer as a retail cost; the goods cost more to truck around, so your per palette fee went up. But everyone needs to get product into the department store NOW if they want to secure Christmas shopping (yes, October sales start the season for the hot toys). Or people want to top off the tanks now as the temperature drops for home heating oil. It all washes back and forth across the economy.
Hard to believe that clip of Carlin is more than 20 years ago now. Very frustrating to me that the price of oil/fuel/gas/diesel is priced by speculators rather than supply/demand. But I’m not sure there is a solution.
The United States is both the largest producer and exporter of diesel. On the production side, China and India come in at 2nd and 3rd, but they don’t export much of that, apparently consuming most of it internally. Russia comes in 4th on production and is also a large exporter. The Netherlands is a large producer, but that also means they import most of the oil they convert into diesel, so not sure what clout they hold. Many other countries both produce and/or export, but all of them much less than the U.S. (Iran produces small amounts of diesel but consumes all of it internally and does not export any.)
So, what is there to prevent the U.S. from following Russia’s lead and insisting that the system change to sell outside the “market price” at the production cost + profit margin? If the U.S. were to move in that direction, what would all those much smaller producers and exporters do trying to remain in the current system beside drive up all their own costs and reduce their profits in the process?
I am not any kind of expert in this subject, so I would love to hear the pros and cons of this.
Sounds to me like price fixing
https://uslawexplained.com/price_fixing
“Call me conspiracy theorist, but it feels as if Trump’s talking about the diesel ban is all about sending a message to EU/UK: release diesel from your SPRs (and stop bidding up the market to beef up said reserves) and talk to Zelenskyy. Or else I close your diesel lifeline.” Javier Blas on X
Market Vibes:
“Europe is by far the largest single holder of commercial and official diesel reserves in the world at 372 mm bbls.”
“Blas is probably correct in his musing about Trump. The EU shares responsibilty for the diesel squeeze. They are at war with their largest supplier of energy… and hoarding a vast supply of emergency fuel stocks while buying it in the open market for daily consumption.”
Why isn’t Europe releasing their reserves?
The U.S. banned crude oil exports from 1975 to 2015. Life went on and we had plenty of gasoline.
Now if you mention diesel ban, people come come up with hundreds of claims on how destructive it would be.
Makes no sense.
Crude oil is an input to the refinery process, diesel is an output. The US never banned refined fuel exports over this time.
It would be like saying ban all wheat exports, but flour exports are ok. But you had so much mill capacity you were net buying wheat to finish so there was zero policy change.
That’s the situation the US was in, we had so much refinery capacity that we net bought from the world, and sold the products at a profit. As import costs went up and extraction costs went down, it started looking like domestic costs would be cheaper, Trump cancelled the export ban, and the US started exporting crude as well as refining.
I do agree on the reserves argument, but winters in Europe are much worse than in the US, they will need those reserves in a month’s time. That’s why the consumers everywhere are taking it on the chin.
Annual U.S. Diesel Fuel Production:
~1.8 billion barrels per year (approximately 76 billion gallons)
This breaks down to roughly 4.9 to 5.1 million barrels per day of refinery net production of distillate fuel oil (which includes diesel, heating oil, and other middle distillates). At 42 gallons per barrel, that’s about 205–215 million gallons per day of petroleum-derived diesel fuel.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MDIRX_NUS_2&f=A
Annual U.S. Diesel Fuel Exports: Distillate fuel oil, which is chiefly diesel fuel, is the largest transportation fuel export by volume from the United States and the third-largest petroleum export, after crude oil and propane.
~475 million barrels per year (approximately 20 billion gallons)
This is based on 1.30 million barrels per day of distillate exports in 2024, according to EIA data. Recent weekly data has shown exports surging to record levels of 1.9 million barrels per day (or ~700 million barrels annually if sustained), but the annual average runs lower.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67304
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65084
Maybe there is a way to disconnect oil, gas, gasoline, and diesel from commodities trading and let the producers price the product?
The price of diesel (and gasoline also) is controlled by market speculators, commodity traders and multinational financial interests. The production of diesel is the cheapest production cost at the refinery because it is the easiest and cheapest to produce (it is the heaviest and first fuel drawn out of the cracking towers… The price at the pump is all about politics…
California / WA /OR buys a preponderance of fuel from overseas.
Proposal: “store” the excess USA fuel on SUPERTANKERS headed to California.
Trump has intentionally timed Xi’s visit. China has despised Britain since the Opium Wars and the theft of tea plants from China in the Victorian age (China owned them all and criminalized the export of live plants or seeds; Britain taught the Chinese how to commit intellectual property theft) and started competing with them by growing the stolen plants in British Colonial India.
I got out of the convenience store business about 10 years ago and at that time we were lucky to break even or lose a nickel on a gallon of gas make it up on inside sales.
I don’t hear that story anymore.
Pay market price for alaskan crab legs even in Ak.
Carlin may have had some good points, but where is the comedy? Norm hated this garbage!
Maybe speculators should be required to store the commodities they speculate on. From pork bellies to oil.