From American crude to American fuel.

By Larry M. Shultz

A farmer cannot harvest a field with a barrel of crude oil. The farm needs diesel — and this year's harvest is running at the highest fuel and fertilizer costs in American history.

Diesel hit $6.31 a gallon the week of September 15, 2026, up from $3.70 a year ago, and past $8 on the West Coast. You don't need a diesel engine to feel it. Diesel moves the food and the freight, so its price lands on every kitchen table in America.

We are not short of oil

Here is what almost nobody is saying: we are not short of oil. American wells pump nearly 14 million barrels a day, near an all-time record.

We are short of the plants that turn that oil into diesel. Refineries are pinned at 97 percent of capacity and distillate inventories sit 13 percent below their five-year average. And we are losing what we have.

America is down to 130 operable refineries, two fewer than a year ago. LyondellBasell's Houston plant closed in March 2025. Phillips 66 ended crude processing in Los Angeles in October 2025. Valero's Benicia refinery ceased operations in April 2026. More than half a million barrels a day erased in eighteen months, against 18.2 million barrels per calendar day of operable capacity at the start of this year.

We cannot simply expand what we own, because its owners are closing it. And no law keeps our own fuel home when the world runs short. So when Persian Gulf and Russian diesel and gasoil exports fell 1.6 million barrels a day between February and August, American diesel was auctioned onto foreign tankers at the higher world price — exactly when our farms and fleets could least afford to lose it.

Americans are not reacting to one bad month. They are exhausted. A pandemic reset the price of everything and they were told it was temporary. In 2022 diesel hit a record and they were told it was temporary. Each time, prices climbed a step and never came back down. A grain farmer is watching this harvest's fuel bill eat the crop's margin. A trucker is parking the rig because the load no longer covers the diesel. Neither did anything wrong. Both are paying for an export law they have never heard of.

Two things would fix this, and both are within reach of Congress this session.

Fix one: a consumer circuit breaker

Finish the job Congress started in 2015 and then seemed to forget.

Section 101 of Division O of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2016 — titled, by its own drafters, "Freedom to Export Crude Oil" — was signed into law as Public Law 114-113 on December 18, 2015, codified at 42 U.S.C. § 6212a and implemented at 81 FR 2943. It repealed the post-embargo law of 1975 that had kept American crude in America for forty years, and it did so in one sentence: no official of the Federal Government shall impose or enforce any restriction on the export of crude oil.

That broad, permanent export protection was traded in the same bill for a five-year extension of the wind and solar tax credits.

Notice the asymmetry. The renewable credits carried fixed terms and expiration dates. The export repeal got neither. Congress kept emergency powers on the books, but they demand hard-to-obtain multi-agency findings and presidential action, with no automatic trigger and nothing written from the consumer's side of the pump. In ten years, no restriction has ever been used.

So the fix is a circuit breaker built to deliver fuel, not to count export cargoes. Congress will negotiate the terms, but the design should look like this: when retail prices run 15 percent above a seasonally and inflation-adjusted three-year average and a verified regional shortage exists, an assessment triggers. Relief targets distillate first — diesel and heating oil — through product-specific, volume-limited, regularly reviewed measures. Crude export restrictions apply only where a specific feedstock shortage is blocking additional domestic fuel production.

Better still, write the rule into the financing itself. Any refinery built with federal or state help — loan guarantees, Defense Production Act money, state bonds, tax abatements — should carry a domestic-supply covenant: its diesel, gasoline, jet fuel and asphalt go to American customers, with committed volumes to designated American terminals during a declared shortage, with public reporting of cost, volume and destination, and terms set before the financing closes.

A refinery built with public money should sell its fuel to the public that built it.

Attach the same covenant to the other benefit Congress controls: relief from the Renewable Fuel Standard, available to small refineries under 75,000 barrels a day. Today that framework shields incumbents, while a new regional refinery with no blending arm must buy every mandated compliance credit on the open market — a cost that lands straight back on the pump price. Extend hardship-based relief to qualifying new entrants, with terms established up front and the domestic-supply covenant attached. The principle is simple and fair: where government confers financing, a benefit, or forbearance on a new refinery, the fuel should serve American customers here at home.

Fix two: build where the oil is — and build it clean

No new refinery with real conversion capacity has opened in America since 1977, and not because the math failed. A conventional plant separates crude by boiling it — roughly 1,000°F under 900 psi — and that violence produces the flaring, benzene, sulfur oxides and particulates that downwind communities have rightly refused for two generations.

That barrier is gone. The patented NZET process — net-zero emissions technology — developed by Clean Refineries Inc. and deployed by Green Fuels Operating does not boil the oil. It atomizes crude into micro-droplets at low pressure and separates the fractions at low temperature in a closed loop, recovering vapors instead of creating toxic refining emissions. The only operating stack is an auxiliary natural-gas heater running below seven parts per million of nitrogen oxides — cleaner than a commercial furnace. That is why an NZET plant can be permitted at ordinary industrial-zoned sites, and why it can be built for roughly half the capital cost of a refinery that boils its oil.

This changes America's refinery map. For a century our refineries clustered on the Gulf Coast to meet tankers carrying imported crude, rather than inland, near the fields and the customers. Today, shipping crude a thousand miles to the coast and hauling the finished fuel back by pipeline and rail is an outdated transportation tax on middle America. For fifty years nobody would tolerate a refinery in their back yard. A plant that does not pollute downwind communities changes that calculus — and lets smaller regional refineries be built where the diesel-rich crude actually is.

That is no longer theoretical. Green Fuels Operating broke ground on May 29, 2026 on a $400 million, 30,000-barrel-a-day clean refinery in Duncan, Oklahoma, on a brownfield site idle since 1983 — expandable to 50,000 barrels a day. The engineering, the emissions verification and a state-by-state map of which American crude actually yields diesel are all in the briefing linked at the end of this article.

Congress already has the tools

On April 20, 2026 the President determined that domestic refining is essential to the national defense under the Defense Production Act, and the Department of Energy was directed to deploy Title III incentives. DOE's Section 1706 authority carries $1 billion through September 30, 2028 and explicitly covers projects that replace ceased energy infrastructure. Congress can appropriate the DPA fund for refining and set competitive selection criteria. The framework exists. The missing ingredient is follow-through.

The calendar will not wait. Harvest is burning fuel now, and within weeks the Northeast starts drawing heating oil from those same thin tanks. Voters have noticed: 47 percent call cost of living their top issue, and 74 percent say it is moving in the wrong direction.

Why both parties can say yes

Republicans get energy dominance made real — more American refining capacity, built fast, export markets untouched in ordinary times. Democrats get what they have waited fifty years for: a refining technology with no toxic process emissions. Not one new polluting plant. For half a century the choice was a dirty refinery or no refinery, and communities rightly said no, which is why nothing has been built. The environmental movement's fifty-year objection was never an obstacle to this plan. It was the specification for it.

Farm states get in-basin refineries matched to diesel-rich crude, closer to the customers who need the fuel. Consumers get fuel that stays home when shortages strike.

The American people produce the oil and pay the bills. They are asking two things: keep American fuel home when shortages strike, and clear the path to build the clean refineries that make the diesel, gasoline, jet fuel and asphalt America needs. No law of physics ties a Permian barrel to the Persian Gulf. Only a law of Congress does.