Diesel Prices, Explained

1. There is no single diesel price

Ask what diesel costs and you will get at least four different numbers, all correct, all describing a different step in the same chain. Untangling them is most of the work of reading diesel news:

• The futures price. The NYMEX contract listed as heating oil, delivered in New York Harbor, sized at 42,000 gallons - one contract is 1,000 barrels. Since May 2013 it has specified ultra-low sulfur diesel (ULSD), so the benchmark for US distillate is a diesel contract wearing a heating oil name. It is quoted in dollars and cents per gallon.
• The spot and rack prices. Physical ULSD trades at hubs such as New York Harbor, the Gulf Coast, Chicago, and Los Angeles, at a premium or discount (the basis) to the futures price. Terminals then post rack prices, the wholesale level at which tanker trucks load. A tight region shows up here first, as a widening basis, days before retail prices move.
• The retail on-highway price. The price at truck stops and service stations, including federal and state taxes. This is the series the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) publishes every Monday in its Gasoline and Diesel Fuel Update, and it is the index most freight contracts use for fuel surcharges.
• The distillate category itself. EIA inventory and demand data do not track diesel alone. They track distillate fuel oil, the whole middle cut: on-highway diesel, off-road diesel, heating oil, and related grades. Every stock number quoted in diesel coverage, including the ones on this page, is a distillate number unless the source says otherwise.

That last point causes real confusion. A story can report comfortable diesel supply while East Coast heating oil stocks are thin, or the reverse, because both live inside the same distillate total. The total tells you the size of the pool. You still have to ask which corner of the pool is tight.

2. What diesel is: a sulfur story in three steps

Diesel comes from the middle of the distillation column, heavier than gasoline and jet fuel blendstock, lighter than residual fuel oil. A barrel of crude yields a limited share of it, and refiners can shift that share only within bounds set by the crude slate and their equipment. The defining fact of modern diesel is not the cut. It is the sulfur that had to come out of it.

EIA's account of the cleanup runs in three steps. Before regulation, high-sulfur diesel averaged about 3,000 parts per million (ppm) of sulfur. In 1993 the Environmental Protection Agency required highway diesel at no more than 500 ppm. Then, starting in 2006, the limit for highway diesel tightened to 15 ppm, phased in fully by 2010: ultra-low sulfur diesel. Nonroad, locomotive, and marine diesel followed, with that transition nearly complete by 2014. The 15 ppm limit is 99.5 percent below the old high-sulfur average. The point of the rules was emissions - ULSD is what lets modern trucks run the particulate filters and catalysts that clean their exhaust - but the cost landed in the fuel. Removing sulfur takes hydrotreating capacity, hydrogen, and energy, and it has to happen on every gallon, forever.

The futures market ratified the change in 2013. The old heating oil contract allowed delivery of product with sulfur up to 2,000 ppm. From the May 1, 2013 contract, NYMEX switched the specification to ULSD at under 15 ppm, the same grade used for most diesel fuel, partly because Northeast states were moving heating oil itself to 15 ppm (New York went first, in July 2012). The EIA noted at the time that New York Harbor terminals would likely store one commingled ULSD product rather than segregate two distillates. One pool, one contract, one price signal for trucks and furnaces alike. That merger is why a cold snap in New England and a freight boom now bid against each other in a single market.

One more grade distinction matters at the pump. Dyed diesel, marked with red dye, is sold tax-exempt for off-road uses such as farm and construction equipment and heating. It is chemically the same pool of fuel; the dye is a tax marker, and using dyed fuel on the highway is a tax offense. When you see a farm diesel price far below the truck stop price, most of the gap is the tax treatment covered in section 4, not a different product.

3. The current balance, in this site's own EIA data

Before the price stack, look at the physical position. The PetroEyes EIA export, refreshed October 13, 2026, carries the week ending October 2, 2026. Four series describe the distillate market that week, and one division turns them into the number that matters:

Read the table as one sentence: the pool held about 29 days of demand, refineries were already running at 92.7 percent of capacity, and the wholesale market priced a gallon of distillate at $4.66 against crude worth about $2.34 a gallon. The gap between those two, about $2.33 a gallon or roughly $98 a barrel, is a simple spot crack for distillate over WTI. Our deep dive on refinery crack spreads covers the standard 3-2-1 and 2-1-1 versions; this single-product version is cruder, but it makes the point plainly. In the autumn of 2026, the barrel was not the expensive part of diesel. Turning the barrel into diesel was.

4. The retail stack: where a gallon's price comes from

The EIA decomposes the retail diesel price into four parts: crude oil, refining, distribution and marketing, and taxes. The shares move around with the market, and the movement is the story. In the EIA breakdown for May 2026, reported from the Gasoline and Diesel Fuel Update, crude oil was 42 percent of the retail diesel price, refining 25 percent, distribution and marketing 23 percent, and taxes 11 percent (the published shares sum to 101 on rounding). Compare that shape with the June 2025 breakdown the EIA published, when a $3.60 retail gallon split 45 percent crude, 19 percent refining, 20 percent distribution and marketing, and 17 percent taxes. In eleven months the refining slice grew by about a third and the crude slice shrank, even though crude itself was expensive in both periods. That is what a distillate shortage looks like from the pump: not a crude story, a conversion story.

Each slice behaves differently, and knowing which one moved tells you what can fix it:

• Crude oil (42 percent in May 2026). Set globally, moves with WTI and Brent, and passes into diesel at roughly the crude share of the price. A $10 a barrel crude move is about 24 cents a gallon before any crack change (10 divided by 42). Our WTI price page tracks the benchmark.
• Refining (25 percent). The crack spread, in retail clothing. It widens when distillate stocks are low, when refineries are down for maintenance or outages, when exports pull product out of the country, and when jet fuel outbids diesel for the same middle barrels. It narrows when stocks rebuild. No tax cut or crude release fixes this slice quickly, because the constraint is physical capacity to make the product.
• Distribution and marketing (23 percent). Pipelines, terminals, tanker trucks, and the retailer margin. Diesel distribution is mostly a truck-stop and fleet-card business rather than a corner-station one, and remote or low-volume locations carry wider margins. This slice also absorbs the lag: wholesale moves reach retail over days to weeks, not hours.
• Taxes (11 percent). The federal excise tax on on-highway diesel is 24.4 cents a gallon, unchanged since 1993, made up of 24.3 cents to the Highway Trust Fund and 0.1 cent to the Leaking Underground Storage Tank fund. Gasoline pays 18.4 cents. That 6 cent federal gap is built into every diesel-to-gasoline comparison in the country, before state taxes, which vary widely and often tax diesel at or above the gasoline rate.

Apply the May 2026 shares to a round number to see the anatomy. On a hypothetical $6.00 retail gallon - a teaching figure, not a quoted price - the EIA shares imply about $2.52 of crude, $1.50 of refining, $1.38 of distribution and marketing, and $0.66 of taxes. If crude fell 10 percent and nothing else changed, the gallon would give back roughly 25 cents. If the crack halved instead, it would give back about 75 cents. In a distillate squeeze, the second lever is the bigger one, and it is the one with no policy switch attached to it.

5. September 2004: when diesel flipped above gasoline and stayed there

Older drivers remember diesel as the cheap fuel. Through most of the 1990s it was: a heavier cut, less processing, lower taxes, priced to move. The EIA dates the reversal to September 2004. Diesel has traded above regular gasoline in the United States almost continuously since, and the agency attributes the flip to three causes that are all still in force:

• Global diesel demand grew faster than gasoline demand. China and India motorised and industrialised on diesel - trucks, construction, agriculture, generators. Europe pushed drivers into diesel cars with tax policy, lifting diesel from 13.8 percent of new car registrations in 1990 to 53 percent by 2007. US refiners found themselves exporting into a world that wanted their middle barrels more than their gasoline.
• The low-sulfur transition raised the cost floor. The 500 ppm step in 1993 and the 15 ppm ULSD step from 2006 both required capital and hydrogen that gasoline refining did not. Section 2 covers the timeline. The premium is not a markup; it is the carrying cost of cleaner fuel, charged on every gallon.
• The federal tax gap. 24.4 cents on diesel against 18.4 cents on gasoline, a 6 cent head start for gasoline in every comparison, set in 1993 and never adjusted.

Two amplifiers joined later. US refinery capacity stopped growing and then shrank at the margin - the EIA has flagged closures including the LyondellBasell Houston refinery in early 2025 and two California refineries with a combined 284,000 barrels per day of capacity planning to close - while distillate exports climbed, averaging 1.2 million barrels per day in the first half of 2025, about 7 percent above the prior five year average, as Europe replaced Russian supply with US product. A static refining base, a growing export pull, and a product the economy cannot postpone buying: that combination is why the post-2004 premium survives every crude cycle. When crude collapses, diesel falls too, but the gap over gasoline usually survives the fall.

6. The seasonal pattern: harvest, heating, and the turnaround squeeze

Distillate demand has a freight baseline that barely moves - trucks, trains, ships, construction, and industry burn diesel in every month - and two seasonal loads stacked on top of it:

• Fall harvest (September to November). Tractors, combines, and grain trucks run long hours, and farms also draw propane and diesel at the same moment (our propane explainer covers the drying side). Harvest demand is weather-compressed: a late, wet crop concentrates the burn into fewer weeks.
• Winter heating (October to March). Heating oil demand is concentrated in the Northeast, the region EIA identifies as the highest-consuming in the country. Because the futures contract and New York Harbor storage now run on commingled ULSD, a cold December in New England bids directly against a trucking fleet in Ohio for the same gallons.
• Jet fuel, the year-round rival. Jet fuel comes off the same part of the column. Strong air travel pulls middle barrels toward jet production, and refiners chasing the better margin will shift yield within the limits of their equipment. Diesel tightness in a strong travel summer is often a jet story wearing diesel clothing.

Supply has its own calendar, and it points the wrong way. Refineries do planned maintenance - turnarounds - mainly in the spring and fall, the shoulder seasons. The fall window lands exactly as harvest and heating demand arrive. Stocks therefore tend to build through summer, when refineries run hard for gasoline and distillate rides along, and draw through winter. The EIA Winter Fuels Outlook of October 6, 2026, as reported by Reuters, had East Coast distillate stocks about 32 percent below their five year seasonal average in September, forecast to stay 20 to 30 percent below average through the winter, with oil-heated households expected to spend about 21 percent more than last winter. The national days-of-supply figure in section 3 and that regional figure are the same warning at two zooms: the pool is thin, and the thinnest part is the region that burns heating oil.

7. How diesel reaches your grocery bill: the fuel surcharge

Diesel is the freight fuel, so its price does not stop at the truck stop. It travels into the price of nearly everything moved by road, through a mechanism most consumers never see: the fuel surcharge. Understanding it explains why goods prices keep rising for weeks after diesel peaks, and why they fall more slowly than the pump price.

The standard structure, described in FreightWaves' guide to trucking surcharges and in carrier tariff documents, has three parts. First, an index: the EIA weekly US average on-highway diesel price, published Mondays. Second, a base price written into the contract, meant to represent the fuel cost already covered by the base freight rate; the surcharge only compensates the carrier for the part above the base. Third, a conversion: truckload contracts usually divide the excess by an assumed fuel economy to get a per-mile charge, while less-than-truckload (LTL) and parcel contracts apply a percentage of the linehaul charge from a published tier table, where each diesel price band maps to a surcharge percentage.

A worked example with hypothetical teaching figures, using the standard per-mile formula:

Three features of the mechanism matter more than the arithmetic. The surcharge resets weekly off the Monday index, so a diesel spike lands in freight invoices within days, while a diesel decline also takes a week or more to flow through, and contracts with monthly resets lag further. Carriers recover the fuel on loaded miles, but trucks also burn fuel empty - repositioning, returning from a delivery, idling in terminal queues - and industry reporting puts recovery at roughly 80 percent for some short-haul work, which is why hauliers push base rates up after a long expensive stretch rather than trusting the surcharge alone. And the shipper paying the surcharge prices it into the goods: a $738 surcharge on a 1,200 mile load of groceries is a per-case cost that reaches the shelf price, spread thin enough to be invisible and broad enough to show up in the inflation data.

8. The 2026 run: a refining shortage, measured

The autumn of 2026 is the cleanest recent demonstration of everything above, so it is worth fixing the sequence in numbers, each from the source named:

• The crack did the damage first. Legal and trade reporting on EIA data (Mondaq, October 2026) put the diesel crack spread at a record $102.20 a barrel on August 17, 2026, and above $106 a barrel in early September, with US distillate stocks expected to fall below 100 million barrels. Our site data in section 3, a simple spot calculation for the week ending October 2, lands in the same neighbourhood at roughly $98 a barrel.
• Retail followed to a record. The EIA weekly average reached $6.529 a gallon for the week ending September 21-22, 2026, as reported in surcharge and trade coverage - above the previous AAA-recorded record average of $5.815 a gallon set on June 19, 2022. Commercial Carrier Journal reported in early October that diesel had spent five weeks above $5.64 and three straight weeks above $6, with the average still around $6.38 a gallon as tax-relief bills stalled in Congress.
• Forecasts chased the market. The EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook completed September 3, 2026 had Brent averaging about $90 a barrel through the second half of 2026 and easing toward $74 in 2027, with distillate inventories staying unusually tight on strong exports and weaker global production. The retail record arrived after that outlook was finished. The lesson is not that the forecast failed; it is that in a crack-driven market, the crude forecast is the least important line in the outlook. The inventory and margin lines carry the risk.
• Tax relief was debated and mostly did not arrive for diesel. Federal suspension bills introduced in May 2026 went nowhere, per Commercial Carrier Journal, and among state actions, Georgia suspended its 37 cent diesel tax temporarily while Indiana suspended gasoline taxes and left its diesel tax in place. This matches section 4: even a full federal suspension would remove 24.4 cents from a price that had moved by dollars, and the refining slice - the actual driver - would be untouched.

Put the sequence together and 2026 reads as a conversion shortage layered on a tight pool: stocks drawn down toward 100 million barrels, East Coast inventories a third below the seasonal average, refineries running above 92 percent with turnaround season starting, exports pulling product abroad, and a crack spread above $100 a barrel converting all of it into pump prices. Crude at $98 was part of the bill. It was not most of the story, and coverage that led with crude missed the mechanism.

9. Renewable diesel and biodiesel: a cushion, not a ceiling

Two non-petroleum fuels now share the distillate pool, and coverage often muddles them. Biodiesel is a fatty acid methyl ester, blended into petroleum diesel at limited ratios. Renewable diesel is a hydrocarbon made from similar fats, oils, and greases but processed to be chemically interchangeable with petroleum diesel, so it can move through the same pipelines and engines without blending limits. Both are driven less by pump economics than by policy: the federal Renewable Fuel Standard and state low-carbon fuel programs create the demand that makes their higher production cost workable.

Scale is the real test. EIA forecasting reported in 2025 expected biodiesel and renewable diesel together to make up about 9 percent of US distillate fuel oil consumption in 2026, up from 5 percent in 2021, and noted that counting biofuel stocks adds about 10 percent more days of supply than petroleum distillate alone shows. University of Illinois farmdoc estimates, built on EIA survey data, put total US renewable diesel nameplate capacity at about 5.2 billion gallons a year by 2025, roughly flat for 2026. Useful, growing, and still a single-digit share of the pool. In a shortage, that share softens the draw on petroleum stocks; it does not cap the crack spread, because these fuels price against the same distillate market they supply into, plus their policy credits. Treat any claim that renewable diesel will bring pump prices down on its own as a scale error.

10. How to read diesel in the weekly data

Diesel's weekly evidence arrives inside the EIA Weekly Petroleum Status Report, the same Wednesday release covered in our guide to the EIA weekly petroleum report, plus the Monday retail print in the Gasoline and Diesel Fuel Update. A working routine, in order:

1. Days of supply, not the stock level. Divide distillate stocks by distillate supplied (section 3 shows the arithmetic: about 28.8 days for the week ending October 2, 2026). Compare with the five year range for that week. Stocks can rise and still tighten if demand rises faster.
2. East Coast (PADD 1) stocks separately. The national pool includes Gulf Coast barrels that serve exports. The Northeast heating market lives off PADD 1 plus arrivals from elsewhere, and it was PADD 1 that sat about 32 percent below its seasonal average in September 2026.
3. The wholesale gap over gasoline. When ULSD trades far above RBOB gasoline at the hub - $1.23 a gallon in our October 2 snapshot - the market is paying for middle barrels specifically. A narrowing gap into winter is relief; a widening one in October is a warning.
4. Refinery utilization and the turnaround calendar. Utilization above the low 90s leaves no slack for an unplanned outage. One large refinery trip during turnaround season can move the national crack more than a week of crude headlines.
5. Exports and imports. Distillate exports around 1.2 million barrels per day, as in the first half of 2025, drain the pool steadily; distillate imports in our October 2 snapshot were just 118,000 barrels per day. The US is a structural exporter of distillate now, so foreign tightness arrives at US pumps through the export bid.
6. The Monday retail print, last. Retail confirms what wholesale already decided. Use it to check the pass-through and to read surcharge tables, not as a forecasting input. For pump-level tracking across cities, see our gas prices page and the benchmark board on markets.

11. Common mistakes in diesel coverage

• Blaming crude for a crack move. In May 2026 crude was 42 percent of the retail price and refining 25 percent, up from 19 percent a year earlier. When the refining slice grows by a third, the headline belongs to refineries and stocks, not to OPEC. Our gasoline price breakdown shows the same decomposition for the other big fuel.
• Quoting the futures price as the pump price. The NY Harbor ULSD print excludes state and federal taxes, distribution, and retail margin - in May 2026 terms, roughly a third of the retail gallon. Comparing a $4.66 wholesale print with a $6-plus retail average and calling the difference profit is an accounting error.
• Treating the national stock total as the whole story. Regional stocks, especially PADD 1 in winter, bind first. National comfort and Northeast shortage have coexisted repeatedly, because pipelines and shipping take time the weather does not grant.
• Assuming a tax holiday fixes a shortage. The full federal diesel tax is 24.4 cents. The 2026 price move was measured in dollars, driven by a crack above $100 a barrel, which is $2.38 a gallon of refining value. Tax relief changes the stack at the margin; it does not make more diesel.
• Forgetting that diesel demand cannot wait. Freight, harvest, and heating demand is price-inelastic in the short run: the truck runs, the combine runs, the furnace runs. That is why diesel spikes are sharper than gasoline spikes - the demand side does not step back to meet the price, so the price does all the adjusting.
• Confusing renewable diesel with a price cap. At about 9 percent of distillate consumption, bio-based diesel cushions stocks and prices into the same market. It is supply, not a ceiling.

12. A reader's checklist

1. Which diesel price is being quoted? Futures, hub spot, rack, or the EIA Monday retail average. Each step adds cost; a story that does not say which one it means is not ready to repeat.
2. What did the crack do? Compare ULSD with crude per gallon (divide the barrel price by 42). If diesel rose and crude did not, you are looking at a refining and inventory event.
3. Where are days of supply? Stocks divided by product supplied, against the five year range for the week. Below the range heading into winter is the standing warning.
4. Which region is tight? Check PADD 1 in winter and the local basis at the nearest hub. Diesel shortages in the US are usually regional events with national price echoes.
5. What is the calendar doing? Harvest, heating season, turnaround windows, and the summer driving peak all pull on the same pool at known times of year. A price move with a calendar explanation needs less conspiracy than one without.
6. Who pays next? Follow the surcharge: the Monday index resets freight contracts within the week, and shelf prices follow over the following weeks. If you want to know where a diesel spike lands, watch freight invoices before grocery receipts.

13. Frequently asked questions

Why is diesel more expensive than gasoline?

It has been, with few exceptions, since September 2004. The EIA gives three structural reasons: strong global demand for diesel and other distillates, the higher cost of producing and distributing ultra-low sulfur diesel after the sulfur rules tightened, and a federal excise tax of 24.4 cents a gallon on diesel against 18.4 cents on gasoline. On top of that structure, the refining slice moves: when distillate stocks are thin, the diesel crack spread widens and diesel pulls further away from gasoline.

What is the difference between diesel, distillate, and heating oil?

Distillate is the refinery category: the middle cut of the barrel that includes diesel fuel, heating oil, and jet fuel feedstock. Diesel is the road and equipment fuel sold out of that pool, now almost entirely ultra-low sulfur diesel (ULSD) at 15 parts per million of sulfur or less. Heating oil is a close chemical cousin burned in furnaces, mostly in the US Northeast. Since May 2013 the New York futures contract called heating oil has actually specified ULSD, so the futures price serves both markets at once.

What does days of supply mean for diesel?

It is distillate stocks divided by distillate supplied (the EIA demand proxy). Using this site's EIA export for the week ending October 2, 2026: 105.1 million barrels of stocks divided by 3.65 million barrels per day supplied gives about 28.8 days. The level alone misleads; compare the days figure with the same week in prior years and with the five year range. Falling days of supply into winter is the pattern that precedes price spikes.

How do trucking fuel surcharges work?

Most contracts index to the EIA weekly US average on-highway diesel price, published Mondays. A common per-mile formula takes the current index price, subtracts a contract base price agreed when the rate was set, and divides by an assumed fuel economy, often around 6.0 to 6.5 miles per gallon. Less-than-truckload carriers usually apply a percentage of the linehaul charge from a tiered table instead. Either way, the surcharge resets weekly, so freight bills follow the diesel print with a short lag.

Why do diesel prices rise in the fall?

Three demands arrive together. Harvest burns diesel in tractors, combines, and grain trucks. Refiners shift yield toward heating oil ahead of winter, and Northeast households start drawing on the same distillate pool. At the same time, fall refinery maintenance takes some capacity offline. Supply is at a seasonal low point just as the pool gains two extra buyers, so the crack spread usually firms in autumn even in calm years.

Is renewable diesel the same as biodiesel?

No. Renewable diesel is chemically a hydrocarbon diesel made from fats, oils, and greases, and it can be used as a drop-in replacement in existing engines and pipelines. Biodiesel is a different molecule (a fatty acid methyl ester) and is normally blended into petroleum diesel at limited ratios. The EIA forecast cited on this page expects biodiesel and renewable diesel together to supply about 9 percent of US distillate consumption, up from 5 percent in 2021, so they cushion the pool without setting its price.

14. Related reading

• Refinery Crack Spreads, Explained - the margin arithmetic that decides how much of the diesel price is refining rather than crude.
• How to Read the EIA Weekly Petroleum Status Report - the Wednesday release that carries distillate stocks, product supplied, and refinery utilization.
• Gasoline Price Breakdown, Explained - the same four-part price stack applied to gasoline, and why the two fuels diverge.
• Propane Prices, Explained - the other fall fuel squeeze: harvest demand arriving ahead of heating season.
• Contango vs Backwardation, Explained - how the futures curve prices storage when a product pool runs thin.
• Gas Prices - delivered fuel prices by city, updated from the site data pipeline.

Data and sources: U.S. Energy Information Administration - Today in Energy, May 10, 2013 (NYMEX heating oil contract switched to the ULSD specification from May 1, 2013, at under 15 ppm sulfur against a previous 2,000 ppm allowance; New York Harbor terminals expected to store one commingled ULSD product; New York state moved heating oil to 15 ppm in July 2012); EIA analysis of distillate sulfur content (pre-regulation high-sulfur diesel averaged about 3,000 ppm; 500 ppm highway limit from 1993; 15 ppm ULSD phased in from 2006 and complete for highway diesel by 2010; nonroad, locomotive, and marine transition nearly complete by 2014; the 15 ppm limit is 99.5 percent below the early-1990s average), as republished by Fuel Oil News and Hydrocarbon Engineering; EIA Gasoline and Diesel Fuel Update price components (May 2026: crude oil 42 percent, refining 25 percent, distribution and marketing 23 percent, taxes 11 percent, as reported by The World Data and Declassified from EIA data; June 2025: retail diesel $3.60 a gallon split 45 percent crude, 19 percent refining, 20 percent distribution and marketing, 17 percent taxes, as reported by Rigzone); EIA explanation of diesel trading above gasoline since September 2004 (global distillate demand growth including European diesel car registrations rising from 13.8 percent in 1990 to 53 percent by 2007, low-sulfur production and distribution costs, and the federal tax gap), as reported by AP/NPR coverage and trade press in October 2026; federal excise tax rates (diesel 24.4 cents a gallon: 24.3 cents Highway Trust Fund plus 0.1 cent Leaking Underground Storage Tank fund; gasoline 18.4 cents; both unchanged since 1993), per the American Action Forum and the Pennsylvania Petroleum Association 2026 rate table; CME/NYMEX and Barchart contract specifications (NY Harbor ULSD, symbol HO, 42,000 gallons per contract, $0.0001 per gallon minimum tick worth $4.20); EIA Winter Fuels Outlook, October 6, 2026 (East Coast distillate stocks about 32 percent below the five year seasonal average in September, forecast 20 to 30 percent below through winter, oil-heated households to spend about 21 percent more), as reported by Reuters; EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook material as reported in 2025-26 (US distillate exports averaging 1.2 million barrels per day in the first half of 2025, about 7 percent above the five year average; LyondellBasell Houston refinery closure in early 2025 and two California refineries with a combined 284,000 barrels per day planning to close; biodiesel and renewable diesel forecast at about 9 percent of US distillate consumption in 2026, up from 5 percent in 2021, adding about 10 percent more days of supply when biofuel stocks are counted), as reported by BP News and Hydrocarbon Engineering; University of Illinois farmdoc daily (US renewable diesel nameplate capacity about 5.2 billion gallons a year by 2025, roughly flat for 2026, built on EIA survey data); diesel crack spread records and the September 2026 retail record (crack at $102.20 a barrel on August 17, 2026 and above $106 in early September; EIA weekly average retail diesel $6.529 a gallon for the week ending September 21-22, 2026; prior AAA record average $5.815 a gallon on June 19, 2022), as reported by Mondaq, AInvest/SMC3 surcharge coverage, Rigzone, and Commercial Carrier Journal (early October 2026: five weeks above $5.64, three straight weeks above $6, average around $6.38, federal suspension bills stalled, Georgia diesel tax suspension and Indiana gasoline-only suspension); FreightWaves guide to trucking fuel surcharges and US Department of Energy tariff material (Monday EIA index, contract base price, per-mile division by assumed miles per gallon, LTL percentage tier tables; short-haul fuel recovery around 80 percent as reported by drayage industry coverage). PetroEyes EIA export refreshed October 13, 2026 (week ending October 2, 2026: distillate stocks 105.138 million barrels, distillate supplied 3.65 million barrels per day, distillate imports 118,000 barrels per day, refinery utilization 92.7 percent, New York Harbor heating oil $4.66 a gallon, NY Harbor gasoline $3.43 a gallon, WTI $98.07 a barrel; days of supply, per-gallon crude, and the simple spot crack computed from those figures on this page). Worked examples labeled hypothetical use invented teaching figures; all other figures are as published by the sources named, for the periods stated.