re: Trump says he will likely implement an EXPORT BAN on DIESEL FUEL

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Tesla is rolling out electric-18 wheelers that is .47 per mile cheaper than diesel trucks.

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Does that include the depreciation cost for the limited life span of the batteries?

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Maybe if Trump stops exports it'll force some of our allies to step up and help us end this war with Iran.

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Why should our Allies get involved in a War that Trump and Israel started?

Solve this problem by eliminating tax on diesel fuel.

Incentives for building 11 new refineries in the US.

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Explain to me how stopping the export of diesel lower the price. There are no shortages, right? Won’t refineries cut back on producing diesel if they can’t export what they have?

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They might as well make it “free”.

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How did we ship diesel around the US before the war? Why can we not use existing infrastructure when the demand in the US is still the same as before?

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Excellent questions and those deal directly with the weediness I was talking about.

TL;DR version - All of this would mean a quick drop in diesel prices domestically, but then spikes on the East and West Coasts. As we import a lot of our goods, the jump in international diesel prices would mean an increase on the prices of imports across the board, likely being greater than any savings we saw from increasing the domestic supply of diesel.

For the more in-depth explanation...

The East Coast (PADD 1) has to bring in ~80%-85% of its diesel from outside its region. While the majority of that comes from domestic transport, around 20% of it comes from international sources because those domestic transport avenues run around 100% capacity 24/7/365 (looking at you, Colonial). This is not only from lack of expanding transport paths (new pipelines, expanding refineries, etc) but the actual shrinking of them because of green politics.

We could just run more tanker ships, but then that runs into problems from The Jones Act. The tl;dr on it is that it mandates that any cargo shipped between two U.S. ports must be carried on ships that are built, owned, flagged, and crewed by U.S. citizens. The problem here is there is such a shortage of qualified ships and crew that it's already cheaper for PADD 1 to have imports come in via tanker from Europe than it is for it to come via tankers from PADD 3 (the Gulf Coast).

PADD 5, the West Coast, imports roughly 60%-65% of its crude oil from the international market (read: Northern Asia and the Middle East) because there are only a couple of very small (relative to demand) pipelines which run from any other PADD to PADD 5. Calling the output from those pipelines "a trickle" could be considered an exaggeration. In essence, PADD 5 is a fuel island. Some of this is green politics, some of this is the reality of the logistical headaches of running pipelines through the Rockies.

As an interesting footnote, Arizona is in a unique position where part of it is fed by the extreme end of PADD 3 (from Texas) while the other part is fed from the extreme end of PADD 5 (California). A diesel ban would likely isolate much of that state as demand from the other, larger states would take precedent.

The US produces ~20% of the diesel on the international market. Suddenly removing that from global trade is going to seriously frick a lot of countries to the point where they will gladly frick us back on the cost to us to import diesel from them under waivers, the cost of increased imports of goods (because those are going to rise and we import a shitload of goods) or both.

To look at a different aspect, ~50% of US storage for finished diesel is in PADD 3. We would see a quick drop in prices domestically but all of the other regions would see those prices spike back up shortly thereafter due to the lack of available storage and that so much of that transport and storage infrastructure is currently maxed or nearly so that we have to rely on crude imports for certain regions.