Think $6 gas is bad? It’s about to get even worse in California.

A supertanker docked in Long Beach just delivered California’s last incoming shipment of Middle Eastern oil, a grim milestone for drivers already paying the nation’s highest fuel prices.

After the New Corolla fully discharges its Iraqi oil at the berth, another tanker carrying Middle Eastern crude won’t dock in California until months after the Strait of Hormuz waterway reopens, according to market intelligence firms Vortexa and Kpler.

For California, the economic pain of the Iran war will last well beyond the arrival of the next tankers. U.S. drillers have fled the state and dozens of refineries have closed since the mid-1980s, forcing California to import 75% of the oil it consumes. Almost one-third of that comes from the Middle East, making California more reliant on crude-oil shipments from Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates than any other U.S. state.

“It’ll take a month or two for flows to start resuming” after the strait reopens, said Patrick De Haan, an analyst at GasBuddy. “Then you have all that catching up to do.”

The New Corolla departed Basra a few days before the U.S. and Israel first attacked Iran, passing through the Strait of Hormuz on Feb. 28. It ferried about 2 million barrels of crude across the Indian and Pacific oceans in a six-week journey. It unloaded some of its cargo last month and appeared to be discharging the rest at a berth in Long Beach on Friday.

The energy crunch in California is worsening by the day. Gasoline prices averaged $6.16 a gallon Friday, the highest in the U.S. and about $1.61 above the national average. Diesel cost $7.48 a gallon, about $1.82 over the U.S. average.

The state’s stockpiles of refined products such as jet fuel and diesel are increasingly strained as big Asian fuel suppliers, including South Korea, slow exports to California to protect their own energy supplies. Only about 35,000 barrels a day of refined products are due to arrive from South Korea in May, down from 100,000 barrels a day in April, Vortexa data show.

And it doesn’t help that two of the state’s major refineries closed in the past six months, cutting off almost one-fifth of its fuel-making capacity. Even if the strait reopens soon, its closure has already withheld at least 1 billion barrels from the global market, analysts say.

California is getting a little relief as larger tankers from the Gulf Coast come in. In mid-March, the Trump administration issued a 60-day waiver of the Jones Act, a rule put in place by then-President Woodrow Wilson in 1920 that prohibits foreign vessels from carrying goods between American ports. The waiver allows companies to ship oil and fuel to California on bigger tankers, improving the economics of typically unprofitable trade flows.

U.S. oil companies including refiner Marathon Petroleum have sent fuel from the Gulf Coast to West Coast states on about a dozen foreign tankers since mid-March. Those tankers have carried roughly 2 million barrels of gasoline, gasoline blending components, jet fuel and biodiesel through the Panama Canal to California, with some limited flows headed to other states like Alaska, Vortexa data show. California typically consumes more than 1 million barrels a day of refined products.

“Vessel availability and location have limited the relief the Jones Act waiver has been able to provide so far,” said Ross Allen, a spokesman for Chevron.

The Trump administration also used the Defense Production Act, a Cold War-era law allowing presidents to speed up the flow of goods in emergencies, to allow oil producer Sable Offshore to restart an offshore pipeline. California regulators had kept the pipeline closed following a 2015 oil spill that fouled the coastline. It is now pumping 50,000 barrels a day of crude into the state.

Chevron has taken some of Sable’s crude into its El Segundo refinery, Chief Executive Mike Wirth told analysts in an earnings call earlier this month.

“We are doing everything we can to meet our supply obligations there,” Wirth said. “But it does point out the vulnerabilities that have been created in California as a result of decades of poor energy policy.”

A quintessential California oil company for more than a century, Chevron moved its headquarters to Houston two years ago after fighting California’s energy policies for years. The company has said the state’s policymakers are responsible for its consistently high gasoline prices, given California’s higher taxes and heavier environmental regulations that have prompted oil companies to decamp to other states. California officials including Gov. Gavin Newsom have pointed back at oil companies, claiming they have been price gouging for years.

This time, Newsom—widely considered a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in the 2028 race—is pointing to President Trump’s war on Iran and the closure of the strait for the state’s high fuel prices.

“No amount of spin from Trump and his lackeys can cover up the fact that Americans shelled out an extra $1.5 BILLION for gas this past week because of his disastrous war with Iran,” Newsom said in a post on social-media platform X in March.

Without a big network of pipelines to carry U.S.-produced crude to California, the state is effectively cut off from the oil boom in Texas, New Mexico and other states. Its reliance on foreign crude made it more vulnerable to the disruption in the strait than the rest of the country, analysts said. As long as the waterway remains shut, California will keep struggling to replace rapidly diminishing supplies.

“There’s nothing else en route” from the Middle East, said Rohit Rathod, an analyst at Vortexa.

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Source: Think $6 gas is bad? It’s about to get even worse in California.