A 90-Day Diesel Export Ban Would Fill Gulf Tanks in 24 Days

A diesel pickup with a 30-gallon tank cost $195.87 to fill at the September 21 national average of $6.529 a gallon, the highest in the Energy Information Administration (EIA) weekly series. A year earlier the same fill cost $112.47, because the average has risen $2.780 a gallon since then. That $83.40 also rides along in the price of everything trucked to your grocery store, and record prices are why some Republican lawmakers now want to stop selling American diesel abroad.

The idea sounds simple: keep the fuel at home and prices fall. Storage is where it breaks. On this article’s estimate from EIA data, if the Gulf Coast had to stop exporting at June’s pace, its empty diesel tanks would be full in about three and a half weeks. After that, a refinery with nowhere to put diesel can run less crude, which means making less gasoline and jet fuel too, or shift what it makes toward products it can still sell abroad.

Where the Ban Stands on September 23

Representative Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican, filed two bills on September 17: one would ban diesel exports through January 2027, the other would trigger a ban whenever the national average for diesel reaches $5 a gallon or more. President Donald Trump backed the idea on September 22, speaking in New York while meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky: “I’ve said let’s not send out the diesel—we make a lot of diesel.”

On September 23, Politico reported, citing five people familiar with the discussions, that the administration was preparing a 90-day ban; Reuters, which relayed the report, said it could not immediately verify it. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the same day that “the blunt tool of banning diesel exports definitely doesn’t work.” A White House official then denied the Politico report, and Wright said nobody is considering a flat ban on shipments of the fuel. Wright also said the administration would make policy announcements in the coming days.

So no ban exists yet, but the idea has the President’s public support and two bills in the House. The storage question applies to any version that lasts more than a few weeks.

The Case for a Ban, in EIA’s Numbers

In the week ending September 18, US refiners produced 5.159 million barrels a day of distillate, the fuel category that includes diesel and heating oil. US demand, which the EIA counts as “product supplied,” was 3.975 million barrels a day that week. Exports were 1.331 million barrels a day, the lowest of the past ten weekly readings, which ran as high as 1.935 million in the week ending August 7.

On paper that is a surplus of more than a million barrels a day, and it is the core of the case for a ban. The problem is that the surplus is made in one place and the pain sits in others.

The Tank Problem

The EIA’s last survey of storage capacity, taken March 31, 2024, counted 65.1 million barrels of working distillate storage at Gulf Coast refineries and bulk terminals. The EIA has since discontinued that report, so it is the newest official count.

At the end of June 2026, Gulf Coast refineries held 13.26 million barrels of distillate and bulk terminals 20.09 million, for 33.34 million in tanks. The Gulf Coast exported 1.311 million barrels a day that month. Assuming tank capacity has not changed much since 2024:

That is the most generous version. Total Gulf Coast distillate stocks, including fuel sitting in pipelines, rose from 41.6 million barrels at the end of June to 44.4 million in the week ending September 18, so the empty tank space is probably smaller now than in June, though the weekly figure is an estimate that also counts pipeline fill. Refiners also would not wait for the last tank: the Atlantic Council says that “even under a ban that lasts only a few weeks, some US refineries might consider reducing crude throughput.” Wright put the mechanism plainly: “If you can’t export the diesel that comes out of our refineries, you run out of places to store it, and you have to reduce US refining, which would put upward pressure on gasoline prices and jet fuel prices.” Daan Struyven, co-head of global commodities research at Goldman Sachs, made the same point from Wall Street: “All the things equal, lower diesel prices would incentivize refiners to reduce their production.”

The whole country does not bail the Gulf out. Nationwide working capacity was 208.0 million barrels, and tanks held 84.0 million at the end of June. That leaves about 124 million barrels of space. Ninety days at the ten-week average national export rate of about 1.68 million barrels a day is roughly 152 million barrels, and most of that space sits far from the Gulf anyway.

There is a leak, too. De Haan points out that “refiners have real flexibility to shift diesel production to jet fuel and then export that instead,” and that distillate blendstocks and unfinished products “could also still then be shipped out and finished abroad.” A narrowly drawn ban could lose some of its bite that way; a broad one leaves refiners fewer options besides running less crude.

Moving Gulf diesel to other US regions is one outlet. GasBuddy petroleum analyst Patrick De Haan notes that Gulf-to-East-Coast shipments hit a record in April, rising above 200,000 barrels a day, under a Jones Act waiver in place since March. That record, in a passage about moving Gulf diesel by water, is at least 15% of what the Gulf Coast was exporting in June. Even with the waiver, De Haan writes, distillates kept flowing abroad “because global export margins are more profitable than moving products coast to coast.”

Russia ran this experiment in 2023. It announced a ban on most diesel and gasoline exports on September 21 of that year, then largely lifted the diesel ban about two weeks later, as refiners warned that a lack of storage would force run cuts.

Who Would Pay Less, and Who Might Pay More

Diesel prices already differ sharply by region. These are EIA’s averages for the week of September 21, 2026:

De Haan writes that “the excess diesel and distillate is on the Gulf Coast while the pain sits on the Northeast and West Coast,” and more recently “the Great Lakes due to some refinery snags.” The Atlantic Council expects a ban to “almost certainly temporarily lower prices for some US consumers along the Gulf Coast and in the Midwest, including many farmers.” That is where the loudest backers are: Senator Chuck Grassley and Representative Ashley Hinson, both Iowa Republicans, have called for a ban, and the Midwest pays more than the East Coast as a whole.

The East Coast’s foreign diesel comes mostly from one neighbor. In each month from January to June 2026, Canada supplied most of the region’s distillate imports, and all 91,000 barrels a day in June.

The West Coast is where the sources disagree. The Atlantic Council calls Alaska, Hawaii and the Pacific states “import-reliant” and says “West Coast consumers would likely see higher prices.” In EIA’s foreign-trade totals for the whole West Coast region, which includes Alaska and Hawaii, the region exported between 72,000 and 185,000 barrels a day of distillate in each month from January to June 2026, while importing between 8,000 and 19,000. Regional totals can hide state-by-state gaps, and De Haan says Gulf shipments to the West Coast spiked this year too. A ban on exports would not, by itself, stop those domestic shipments. There is also a trade risk. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum warned in the week before Wright spoke that a ban could draw retaliation from countries that export fuel to the US, which could hurt states like California.

The Atlantic Council expects “significant effects beyond the United States.” US diesel exports of about 1.5 million barrels a day are almost a fifth of the roughly 8 million barrels traded by sea each day. About 120,000 barrels a day of US diesel have gone to Mexico by overland pipeline so far this year, and Mexico’s diesel on hand fell to under six days of supply in April 2026, by the Atlantic Council’s calculation.

Can a President Ban Diesel Exports?

The clean legal route is gone. From 1975 until December 2015, federal law let a president restrict exports of “coal, petroleum products, natural gas, or petrochemical feedstocks” by rule. The same section also required the crude oil export ban, and Congress repealed it in December 2015, ending both. What replaced it lets a president restrict crude oil exports for up to a year at a time, renewable, after declaring a national emergency or in two other narrow cases, and it says nothing about diesel. The same section says nothing in it limits the President’s authority under other laws “to prohibit exports.”

That leaves the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which lets a president “prevent or prohibit” the “exportation” of property in which a foreign country or foreign national has any interest. It requires a declared national emergency over an “unusual and extraordinary threat” with its source “in whole or substantial part outside the United States.”

The Supreme Court limited IEEPA on February 20, 2026; the syllabus states its holding that the law “does not authorize the President to impose tariffs.” In a part of the opinion that spoke for the Court, it described the law’s verbs as actions “a President might take in sanctioning foreign actors or controlling domestic actors engaged in foreign commerce—blocking imports, for example, or prohibiting transactions.” On that reading, a ban is closer to what the law describes than a tariff was, though no court has ruled on one.

What to Watch

If a ban does come, the first place it will show is the Gulf Coast distillate stock figure in the EIA’s Weekly Petroleum Status Report, next due September 30. That figure also counts fuel in pipelines, so read it as a trend. At June’s export pace, stranded diesel would add about 9 million barrels a week to Gulf inventories, and about three and a half of those weeks would fill June’s empty tank space. If you run a diesel truck, a tractor or a heating-oil furnace, that line tells you how long any relief lasts.