The Trump Administration is frantically searching for ways to bring diesel prices under control, and the search is landing just as New England households start buying heating oil for winter.
The White House has considered everything from encouraging refiners to limit exports, allowing broader use of tax-exempt dyed diesel and pressing European allies to release emergency diesel stocks. The president’s threat of a diesel export ban has dominated headlines. Those are extraordinary measures, but so are diesel prices, which recently reached record levels above $6 a gallon.
This has a particularly pronounced impact on Connecticut, where about one in three homes relies on heating oil. If current prices hold, those households could pay roughly $1,700 more to heat their homes this winter.
One measure the Trump Administration has repeatedly pointed to as a success in taming high energy prices is its waiver of the Jones Act, which requires waterborne goods shipped between U.S. ports to use vessels that are built, owned, and operated by Americans.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in August that allowing foreign vessels to move petroleum between U.S. ports had kept energy prices in California and on the East Coast “lower than they would otherwise be.”
Maybe. But that is a counterfactual. There is no pump displaying what diesel would cost in an alternate world without the waiver, just as there is no gas station selling gasoline at pre-Iran war prices.
We can, however, look at what actually moved and put those barrels in perspective.
The Cato Institute, which favors the outright repeal of the Jones Act, has counted 997,000 barrels of petroleum products delivered into New England over 115 days, or about 8,700 barrels a day. Cato shows exactly why a Jones Act waiver would not solve New England’s upcoming fuel problems.
Cato is now touting the supply aspects of the waiver, where before their refrain was that foreign tankers would move product for three or more times less than U.S. flag tankers. The fact that foreign tankers with waivers are getting rates above U.S. flag tanker rates has temporarily silenced that subterfuge.
For perspective, the six New England states consumed roughly 259.4 million barrels of petroleum products in 2024 – over 700,000 barrels every day. Connecticut’s total diesel consumption alone was about 17 million barrels, of which a little more than half was for home heating oil.
Put the numbers next to each other, and the waiver volumes Cato identified were equal to roughly 1.2 percent of the region’s normal consumption rate.
How much did the Jones Act waiver do for New England’s fuel supply? There is little evidence the waiver helped shore up the region’s supply of distillate, which includes diesel and home heating oil. Just 2.5 million barrels were in storage by late September, according to the Energy Information Administration. That’s a record low and about two weeks of ordinary supply.
For reference, in 2020, the region had 12.6 million barrels of distillate stored for winter.
Connecticut’s own distillate stocks, held at bulk terminals in New Haven, Bridgeport, and Groton, are about 85 percent lower than in 2020, according to the latest Energy Information Administration data.
The other question is, what is the cost impact of the Jones Act waiver on the East Coast? Previous analysis published by the NBER suggests that eliminating the Jones Act would reduce average East Coast diesel prices by less than 2 cents per gallon. In Connecticut — using the NBER’s New England figure — it is only about half a cent per gallon for diesel.
My own estimates put the waiver’s effect at about 2/100 of a cent per gallon of gasoline nationwide.
That is a very different scale from the problem Chris Wright and the Trump Administration are trying to solve.
This should not be surprising. Freight is only one part of the delivered price. Fuel prices track crude oil and refinery margins much more closely than the cost of a ship.
The crack-spread pricing and windfall profits of oil majors have received significant attention from the Administration for this reason. In the second quarter of 2026, Valero earned $3.7 billion – more than five times the prior year’s earnings – and Phillips 66 earned $3.8 billion, its strongest quarter since 2022, with refining profits of about $3.1 billion.
Ultimately, Connecticut buys fuel in a global market. Refinery outages, crude prices, international diesel demand, exports, storage economics and the cost of tanker capacity all matter.
The search for a diesel fix has been frantic, and winter is not waiting. As politicians look for someone to blame, it’s been demonstrated that the Jones Act is not the right scapegoat.
John D. McCown is Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Center for Maritime Strategy and author of the 2020 book Giants of the Sea.