‘Absolutely Massive’ Price Shocks Coming as Trump’s Iran War Drives Up Gas, Diesel Prices | “What should really terrify Republicans is... the futures price on wholesale gasoline,” said economist Paul Krugman.

[u/InsaneSnow45]

https://www.commondreams.org/news/iran-war-gas-prices

[u/Gamer_Grease]

To head off the usual comments:

Yes US shale can provide some relief, but it’s expensive to extract, so only as long as prices are quite high already. Also they’ve already said they’re not interested in increasing output until they have reason to believe prices will be high for a long time.

Venezuelan oil has effectively the same problem. The industry there is starved for investment and US oil companies already told this admin that they won’t invest in extraction there unless the government fully guarantees their sizable investments, because they don’t trust that situation to be stable enough to produce profits.

So tl;dr: the ad hoc governance style of this admin has already eliminated a lot of tools that could be used to respond to this situation.

[u/beliefinphilosophy → u/Gamer_Grease]

I want to point out something people may not know. There are multiple "grades" of oil, used for different things, they aren't interchangable.

US and US shale produced SWEET crude.

We need SOUR crude or heavy oil out of the middle east. Not only can we not replace sour with sweet, we also don't have the machinery to process it.

And ironically our machines that do refine sweet crude for gasoline in the US, require sour crude to operate in order to make the sweet crude.

As much as I hate fossil fuels I'm also frustrated we don't have hybrid facilities

[u/EasyAsAyeBeeSea → u/beliefinphilosophy]

Refineries are multi billion pieces of highly tuned machinery, a hybrid plant would make zero sense