My Mobil now $6.32.

And it seems we’ve hit $7.50 around here. Yee haw.

Sam's Club $5.85 / $7.84 for diesel
Costco $6.05

Ouch!
California is a beautiful place... but I wouldn't want to have to fill my tank there.
It's mostly around $4.09 here but a bit south I can find it for $3.69

If California prices were taken out of play, the national average would be probably 50-60 cents lower than the current $4.41.

When I worked in California 2002 to 2005, there were 22 refineries at the beginning and 21 by the time I left. Today, there are 12 refineries. California wasn't just a refiner for itself as historically it has been an exporter to Arizona and Nevada. Way too many CA residents believe in NIMBY and don't want emissions from something that benefits someone else.

The CA politicians and Newscum bragged as last two refineries (one in LA suburb and one in San Francisco suburb) closed in the last 2 years. Old landlocked refineries surrounded by neighborhoods (there are safe distances for setbacks of new processing equipment to the public) and having to participate in a cap & trade emissions scheme and the final nail in the coffin occurred as the State passed minimum gasoline inventory laws (i.e. the government telling a private business how much inventory they need to keep in their "store"). CA always had lower days of inventory than rest of country because of the temperate climate is almost always conducive to logistics.

Stanford, the environmentalists, politicians, etc. argue that they didn't need the refineries and can manage on imported gasoline. Doesn't work when there is a global disruption in crude oil (e.g. Strait of Hormuz) and global disruption in gasoline and diesel (e.g. Ukrainians drones striking Russian refineries on average once every 6 days in 2026). Now, they get to bid against Europe because the Europeans are also not self-sufficient and depended on Russian diesel.

Oil and Gas industry argues that you can't run a long-term business in an environment with constantly changing regulations requiring capital investment and producing a boutique fuel (i.e. CARBOB gasoline and CARB diesel different than rest of US). On top of that, politicians have done things like pass regulations that can only be met following one company's patent and require the other refineries in state to pay licensing fees to their competitor (e.g. the original mandate that put removed MTBE and put ethanol in CA's boutique gasoline required paying Unocal for their technology).

Speaking of Stanford, here is a nice piece of drivel written by them in 2025 :

1-year later and there "pump prices will not be significantly affected as California continues to transition away from fossil transportation fuels" is already false.

Wrote the paper as if 2 refineries were closing in future, but geniuses didn't even know one had been closed 8 months when they wrote their article.

Argues that environmental laws don't affect drilling. BS! While I was a resident a multi-billion dollar deal collapsed where the federal gov't granted offshore leases in 36 tracts in federal waters. California's massive bureacracy of never ending environmental impact studies and lawsuits killed it.

notice how all of the environmental economics position papers comes from Stanford's law school not their economics school or science school. It's almost as if lawfare drives the environmental movement.

---

Ego is the anesthesia that deadens the pain of stupidity

DISCLAIMER: These are the author's own personal views and do not represent the views of the author's employer.