Diesel used to be the unsexy cousin at the fuel pump — the one that smelled faintly of ferry docks, farm equipment, and long bus rides to summer camp. is no longer. Diesel - what you get when you refine crude oil through a fractional distillation process. It's thicker and less volatile than gasoline and requires a different motor to run.
If you are thinking its use just for old - versions cars, but how critical it is , is hard to think about. Heavy Machinery , 76% of all US trucking and most US freight and passenger rail ( plus 20% of Europe’s rail traffic hence diesel really keeps our economies running (albeit at low to moderate speeds) — construction, logistics, groceries, you name it, .and we've already explored one big price driver, which is just the general oil price, spiked by wars around Hormuz, Bab-el-Mandeb, and Russia.
But over the past 12 months, US diesel has specifically soared higher (+74%) than petrol (+41%). Ditto in the EU, where diesel is up 45% while petrol is up 29%. This should be noted and thanks to multi-billion-dollar investments over the past decade as Kuwait's Al Zour, UAE's Ruwais, Iraq's Karbala, the pre-war Middle East was refining 15% of the world's diesel or a fifth of all global seaborne exports. But Iran and its proxies spoiled this picture and struck not just tankers and pipes, but also key refineries, meaning net diesel exports from the Gulf are now barely a quarter of pre-war levels. Ukraine's counterattacks on Putin's refineries are also a driver, though the "missing" Russian diesel is maybe a third of what's now offline in the Gulf.
Surprisingly the world may not aware that since since 1976 the last refinery was ground up in US was Marathon's Garywille , Louisiania plant and no other refinery was built up by US as confirmed by Chevro's CEO. Why no new refineries builds, per Chevron's Wirth: it comes down due to to economics and policy risk, committing capital that needs decades to pay off, in a policy environment where governments are signaling they don't want these products long-term
This situation definitely worries Trump — but with his hollow bravado and tendency toward bluster, he risks creating a crisis so large that it could bring the US economy to a halt. In his insistence on destroying Iran, he has set himself on a path toward his own undoing. And when such leaders emerge in the world, they end up turning into a spectacle for everyone to watch.