Gasoline Imports Make California Dependent on an Unstable World

A new article from Extracting Fact puts a sharp point on a growing danger in California’s fuel market: the more Sacramento pushes the state away from in-state oil production and refining without a ready replacement, the more California becomes dependent on foreign barrels, foreign refiners, foreign traders, and foreign events it cannot control. That is not energy security. That is strategic self-sabotage.

The remarkable part is that this is no longer just an industry warning. California’s own Energy Commission has now said plainly that imports “introduce new vulnerabilities” by making the state more exposed to “geopolitical events, external markets, and regulatory changes in other jurisdictions.” The same CEC response to Governor Newsom also acknowledges that California already imports over 75 percent of the crude oil used by in-state refineries and about 10 to 20 percent of its gasoline, with gasoline imports projected to rise to 25 to 35 percent of statewide demand by the summer of 2026, and up to 50 percent in Northern California after announced refinery closures.

That should stop people cold. California is the nation’s most isolated major fuels market. It does not have the luxury of simply calling the next state over and asking for a quick pipeline fill-up. When Sacramento drives out local production and shrinks local refining capacity, it is not replacing those supplies with some magical frictionless alternative. It is replacing them with marine cargoes, long lead times, port bottlenecks, international bidding wars, and exposure to whatever chaos the world serves up next. Extracting Fact notes exactly that: California’s growing reliance on imported fuel means adding foreign producers and global commodities traders into the supply chain, with no duty to California consumers other than squeezing the best price they can get.

Even more telling, the CEC itself is not recommending a blind sprint away from the existing petroleum system. It explicitly recommends retaining in-state refining capacity where possible and taking action to stabilize in-state crude oil production and distribution to support California refineries. It warns that reduced in-state crude output forces more imported crude, increases exposure to geopolitical risk, threatens pipelines and other infrastructure, and erodes high-wage jobs and local tax bases in oil-producing communities. In other words, even the state’s own analysts now recognize that California cannot safely govern this issue with slogans and press releases.

This is the central failure of California’s current energy policy. Instead of pursuing an all-of-the-above strategy that preserves reliability, affordability, and energy security while alternatives scale up, state leaders have treated in-state oil and gas as the enemy to be stamped out first and figured out later. The result is exactly what common sense would predict: less California production, less California refining, more dependence on imports, more vulnerability to world events, and more pain at the pump for working families. That is not climate leadership. That is a California-last energy policy.

California should not be shutting in its own producers in favor of producers in foreign countries. It should not be outsourcing reliability to tankers crossing unstable waters. And it should not be pretending that dependence is resilience. If policymakers are serious about protecting consumers, they should stop making California more reliant on an unstable world and start preserving the in-state energy system that keeps this state moving.