Every State In The U.S. Is Now Paying $4 A Gallon For Gasoline: AAA

Pain at the pump is worsening nationwide, as every state in the United States is paying more that $4 a gallon for gas, according to AAA.

AAA’s Gas Prices tracker broke another record Tuesday, with the national average price for a gallon of gas climbing to $4.523 per gallon. That number is nearly $1.50 more per gallon than last year, when the average price was $3.045. At the same time, the average price for a gallon of gas climbed above $4 in every state in the union.

The states of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Georgia were the final holdouts. Gas prices in Oklahoma rose to $4.01 per gallon, an increase of just over one cent from Monday’s average of $3.99. Prices in Kansas rose 2 cents, from $3.98 per gallon Monday to $4.00 Tuesday. In Georgia, prices climbed an additional 6 cents overnight, from $3.99 to $4.06 per gallon.

Prices in California also crossed the $6 threshold Tuesday. The statewide average rose to $6.02 per gallon Tuesday, up 4 cents from Monday’s average of $5.98 per gallon. Two states, Oregon and Alaska, crossed the $5 mark as well. Washington and Nevada have also seen prices rise above $5 a gallon in recent weeks.

Prices have also soared to record highs in Canada. GasBuddy Chief Petroleum Analyst Patrick de Haan reported Tuesday that average prices in Canada surpassed $2 per liter for the first time ever.

The price of diesel continued to soar as well. The price of a gallon of diesel fuel rose to $5.57 Tuesday, continuing a streak of record-breaking price increases. Diesel prices broke records first in March of this year, but began climbing again in April and have continued since then. This time last year, the price of a gallon of diesel was about $3.17.

Experts have pointed out a number of potential causes for the continued surge in prices at the pump. The Biden administration has continued to be critical of American oil and natural gas production.

The Department of the Interior canceled a massive lease, totaling more than 1 million acres, in the Cook Inlet in Alaska, citing a “lack of industry interest in leasing in the area.”

The DOI also canceled two lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico because of “conflicting court rulings that impacted work on these proposed lease sales.” Biden also shut down the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office, and has previously nominated anti-fossil fuel advocates like Saule Omarova and Sarah Bloom Raskin, who have called for the financial sector to divest from fossil fuels.

In addition to lack of production, the U.S. is also experiencing a shortage of refinery capacity, especially for diesel fuel. According to the Energy Information Administration, the U.S. achieved about 19 million barrels per day in refinery capacity in 2019. But capacity declined by 4.5%, or nearly 1 million barrels per day, in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and has not recovered.

As National Review’s Jim Geraghty pointed out Tuesday, six major oil refineries closed down in 2020: the Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery in Philadelphia, PA; the Shell refinery in Convent, LA; the Tesoro Marathon refinery in Martinez, CA; the HollyFrontier refinery in Cheyenne, WY; the Western Refining refinery in Gallup, NM; and the Dakota Prairie refinery in Dickinson, ND. All but one of those refineries has been shut down permanently or converted into a refinery for processing biofuels.

Without these refineries and no existing plans to build new refineries or expand existing ones, as one Bloomberg headline put it: “The US Can’t Make Enough Fuel and There’s No Fix in Sight.“