Gasoline is expensive. Diesel is worse. Social media is melting down and has apparently decided America is running out of fuel.
U.S. gasoline inventories rose 800,000 barrels last week to 207.7 million barrels, according to the EIA. Stocks are 5% below the five-year average for this time of year. Tight, certainly, but hardly empty-tankish.
Refineries processed 17.3 million barrels per day last week and operated at 96.8% utilization. Gasoline production increased to 9.6 million bpd. Gasoline demand averaged 8.8 million bpd over the past four weeks, down 1% from a year ago.
That hasn’t stopped gasoline prices from rising.
AAA put regular gasoline at $4.44 per gallon Thursday, up 16 cents in a week and more than $1.20 from a year ago. Diesel hit a fresh record at $6.40 per gallon.
Diesel inventories explain more of the anxiety. Distillate stocks rose 1.6 million barrels last week but remain 13% below their five-year average. Russia has lost refinery capacity to Ukrainian drone strikes and extended restrictions on diesel exports. Middle Eastern product exports remain impaired by the Iran war. Those are real missing barrels.
The Great Lakes have another problem layered on top. GasBuddy’s Patrick De Haan says refinery issues have pushed retail diesel to about $6.65 in Michigan, $6.53 in Ohio, $6.49 in Indiana and $6.46 in Illinois. He sees Michigan and several neighboring states approaching $7.
That is a regional refining problem sitting inside a global diesel problem.
De Haan has also been calling out viral posts claiming U.S. stations are broadly running dry, describing the alarm as fake. The EIA data back him up on gasoline: inventories rose last week, production rose, and demand is running below last year.
Crude inventories are also 1% above their five-year average.
There is plenty here to dislike. WTI is above $100. Refinery capacity is running hard. Diesel stocks are thin. Russia and the Middle East are removing fuel from a market that did not have much spare capacity to begin with.
A $4.44 gallon of gasoline is painful.
It is not evidence that the country is running out of it.
Pricing hysteria could, however, create the very shortages people are panicking about in a self-fulfilling prophecy kind of way, with people rushing to fill up overnight in an effort to get in before a “pice spike”.
By Julianne Geiger for Oilprice.com
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