$4 Gas — But a Lot of It

Why the White House isn’t trying to make fuel cheaper. It’s trying to make sure there’s enough.

March 18, 2026

Photo by Chris Johnson on Unsplash

You’re going to keep paying nearly $4 (or much more) a gallon for gas. Probably for a while. No policy announcement coming out of Washington this week is going to change that, and if any politician tells you otherwise, they’re not being straight with you.

But here’s what did just change, quietly, in a way most of the coverage missed: the U.S. government made a series of moves today that are not about price. They are about volume. About making sure that when you pull into a gas station in Boston or Charlotte or Jacksonville over the next 2 weeks (or 60 days), there is actually gasoline in the ground beneath your feet.

That distinction — between the price of a thing and the availability of a thing — is the whole story. And it’s a more interesting story than the one being told.

What Just Happened

Two things landed within hours of each other today.

The White House confirmed a 60-day waiver of the Jones Act — the century-old law that requires any cargo moving between American ports to travel on American-built, American-crewed, American-flagged ships. For the next 60 days, foreign tankers can legally move oil, natural gas, fertilizer, and coal between U.S. ports. They couldn’t do that yesterday. They can today.

Separately, the U.S. is releasing up to 172 million barrels of crude from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) — the giant underground salt caverns in Louisiana and Texas where the government stockpiles emergency oil. That crude needs to get from where it’s stored to where refineries and fuel terminals can actually use it.

Those two decisions, taken together, are a single operation wearing two hats. The SPR release creates the supply. The Jones Act waiver creates the distribution network to move it. Neither works without the other, and together they’re designed to solve a very specific problem on a very specific timeline: the next 10 to 14 days.

Why Two Weeks?

Here’s a number that puts everything in context. Since February 28 — the day the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran under Operation Epic Fury — tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has collapsed by approximately 92%. On an average day before the war, more than 100 ships transited that narrow waterway. Since the war began, 21 total have made it through.

The strait carries roughly 20% of the world’s daily oil supply. That supply has essentially stopped moving.

And it gets more specific than that. Right now, around 984 tankers, approximately 22% of the entire global tanker fleet, are either stranded inside the Persian Gulf, anchored outside the strait waiting to see if the security situation changes, or so far off their normal trading schedules that they’ve become effectively idle. Think of it like a global traffic jam: hundreds of ships that should be en route to Rotterdam, Singapore, and New York are just sitting there, and waiting.

That disruption is the real reason gas prices jumped nearly a dollar a gallon in three weeks. Not shipping costs. Not the Jones Act. The war and the closure of a narrow waterway off the coast of Iran added roughly $40 per barrel as a pure fear premium on top of whatever the market fundamentals would otherwise dictate. And no domestic policy touches that number as it is a global number.

What domestic policy can touch is the secondary problem: American refineries and fuel terminals on the East Coast and elsewhere need crude and product flowing into them consistently or they start running short on inventory. Normally, that flow comes partly from the Gulf Coast via tanker. With global tanker supply dislocated, that flow is at risk. Hence the moves today.

The Elegant Paradox at the Center of This

Here is the genuinely interesting part that almost nobody is discussing.

The same crisis that disrupted global tanker supply also, accidentally, created an available pool of ships sitting idle in exactly the right place.

All those vessels whose normal trading cycles got blown up by the Hormuz closure — the medium-range tankers that run between the Caribbean, Latin America, and the U.S. Gulf Coast; the Aframax tankers whose charterers cancelled Middle East-connected voyages — many of them are floating in the Atlantic Basin right now with nothing to do. Their normal contracts evaporated when cargo from the Gulf stopped moving. They are nearby. They are idle. And until today, U.S. law prohibited them from taking on domestic American cargo.

The Jones Act waiver is essentially the government saying: you, idle Panamanian tanker sitting in the Gulf of Mexico waiting for an assignment that isn’t coming — you can now load oil in Houston and deliver it to Boston.

The proof that this is already happening: within hours of the waiver announcement, the first deal hit the spot market. A Panamanian-flagged MR tanker called the PIS Kalimantan was fixed for a voyage from the U.S. Gulf Coast to Jacksonville, Florida, loading in three days. You don’t fix a ship for loading in three days unless it’s already nearby and idle. The vessel was there. It just needed legal permission to work.

The Money: Who Pays, Who Profits

Let’s follow the actual dollars, because this part gets glossed over.

The government is selling SPR crude at current market prices — roughly $99 per barrel today. It is not giving this oil away. The SPR was largely refilled when oil was trading in the $60–70 range. Selling at $99 is a meaningful profit on the inventory. So the Treasury is actually collecting revenue while simultaneously claiming credit for “releasing strategic reserves to help American consumers.”

Consumers, meanwhile, are not getting cheaper oil. They are getting available oil at the market price. The relief is supply continuity, not a price cut. The gas station doesn’t run out. That’s the win being purchased here — and it’s a real win, just not the one the press releases suggest.

The foreign tanker operators get paid market rates to move that crude around the domestic system. They are, in a very literal sense, the beneficiaries of the Hormuz crisis: their ships were idle, now they have work, and the disruption that made them idle also pushed tanker rates up sharply. The first Jones Act waiver deal priced at $6.74 per barrel of shipping cost — much higher than the $3.70 per barrel that Jones Act vessels were charging on the same route before the crisis. Foreign tankers are not cheaper right now. They are available.

American Jones Act operators lose some business they would otherwise have had. That’s a real cost to American workers and companies. The American Maritime Partnership, the industry’s main lobbying group, made clear today that they are “deeply concerned” (so am I) and reiterated that the waiver “will not reduce gas prices” — both of which are entirely correct. The industry isn’t wrong on the facts. It’s just that the facts, in this specific crisis window, don’t favor their preferred outcome.

The LNG Story Nobody Is Telling

Buried inside the waiver is a detail that matters more than all the tanker economics: liquefied natural gas.

There are zero — not a few, not a handful, zero — Jones Act-compliant LNG tankers operating in the United States. The law has required domestic cargo to move on American ships since 1920, but no one ever built an American LNG tanker for domestic trade, because the economics never worked under normal conditions.

The practical consequence is bizarre. The United States is the world’s largest LNG exporter. American gas flows out of Louisiana terminals to Japan, South Korea, and Europe. But that same American gas cannot legally move by ship from Louisiana to Massachusetts, because there is no American LNG tanker to carry it. New England has periodically imported LNG from Trinidad and Norway — foreign gas, on foreign ships — because the alternative was importing American gas on a non-existent American ship.

In a crisis where Middle East LNG supplies are disrupted and European gas prices have roughly doubled, that regulatory gap becomes genuinely dangerous for New England’s heating and power supply. The Jones Act waiver is the only mechanism that allows a foreign LNG carrier to legally move American gas between American ports. That is arguably the most consequential practical impact of today’s decision — more than the oil tanker economics, more than the gas price optics.

What This Actually Buys You

Put it all together and the realistic picture for the next two weeks looks like this:

The first foreign tankers start loading Gulf Coast crude and product this weekend. SPR crude starts flowing through pipelines to marine terminals simultaneously. Within 10–14 days, meaningful additional volumes of oil and refined product start arriving at East Coast distribution terminals. New England LNG storage gets a direct domestic supply option for the first time ever.

Gas at the pump stays at roughly $4. The price is set by global crude markets and the $40/barrel war fear premium, neither of which this waiver touches. But the probability that your local station actually has gas — that the tanks are full, that the supply chain behind your local distributor is intact — that probability just went up.

That is not a nothing. In a world where the worst case is not $4 gas but $4 gas and empty pumps, continuity of supply is a significant thing to buy.

The interesting political economy question, the one that will matter long after this crisis passes, is whether a 60-day waiver of the Jones Act in wartime will look, in retrospect, like a sensible emergency measure or the opening move in a longer erosion of American maritime protection. That debate is real and worth having. But it is a different debate from the one playing out at the pump today.

Today’s debate is simpler: not cheap gas, but enough of it. The government made its bet. The tankers are loading.

The author is a technologist working on infrastructure for the emerging agent economy. He used to live in Puerto Rico. He has thoughts about the Jones Act.

© 2026. This work may be shared freely with attribution.