(The Center Square) – Scientists and energy industry experts took California’s lawmakers to task on Tuesday, saying that the state’s anti-energy regulations have shut down oil refineries across the state and driven up oil prices.
In an Assembly Energy and Utilities Committee meeting Tuesday afternoon, state politicians voiced concern about several global shocks outside of California’s control that are causing the biggest disruption in history to the state’s oil supply.
“The last California-bound tanker to pass through the Strait of Hormuz since the war began is at the Port of Long Beach right now, offloading valuable cargo – some two million barrels of crude oil,” Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, D-Irvine and chair of the Assembly Utilities and Energy Committee, said at the outset of the meeting. “When this tanker is empty, it is unclear where the next replacement ship will be coming from, and we are feeling the impact already here in California.”
According to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, California produced roughly 1 million barrels of crude oil, or petroleum, a day in 1980, far above the 257,000 barrels a day produced in 2025. One 42-gallon barrel of crude oil can produce 19 to 20 gallons of gasoline, according to the Energy Information Administration. Data from the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration shows that 13.3 billion gallons of gas were sold in California in all of 2025, and 1.045 billion were sold in January 2026 alone. The state imported 61.1% of the crude oil it needs to produce gas in 2025 from foreign countries, most notably Iraq, Brazil, Guyana, Canada, Ecuador and Argentina.
With so much of the state’s crude oil supply coming from other parts of the world, energy industry experts told lawmakers that regulations are to blame for rising energy prices and volatility.
“California’s petroleum system has been weakened by design,” Jodie Muller, the president and CEO of the Western States Petroleum Association, testified on Tuesday afternoon. “For years, state policies have pushed the refining sector to contraction, with predictable consequences – less in-state production, reduced resilience and higher costs for Californians.”
The current system has very little margin for error because of the declining number of oil refineries in the state, Muller told lawmakers.
“We are now at an inflection point,” Muller said. “Additional policy pressures risk pushing the remaining refineries past the breaking point. We are still seeing hostile legislation by your colleagues.”
Those remaining refineries, which numbered at 13 in 2024, are now even fewer, The Center Square previously reported. Several oil refineries, including the Phillips 66 refinery in Wilmington and the Valero refinery in Benicia, closed in recent months. Lawmakers who worked in the oil and gas industry previously told The Center Square that increasingly costly regulations impose an additional burden on the cost of doing business in California, forcing many oil refineries to close.
Scientists said on Tuesday that while crude oil prices are normally volatile, California’s gas prices have gone up since the beginning of the conflict with Iran.
“California prices are up about a dollar and a half since the war started,” Severin Borenstein, faculty director of the Energy Institute at the Haas School of Business at University of California, Berkeley, testified. “Part of that, of course, is the increase in the price of crude oil. That is hard to exactly track, because crude oil prices are so volatile. To know exactly how much of that is to crude is tough, but probably around a dollar and a half a gallon.”
The conflict in Iran, which started Feb. 28, broke out after no deal came out of nuclear talks between the United States and Iran. That conflict, which is costing American taxpayers $1 billion a day, is also costing the U.S. and other countries their oil exports from the Middle East. The Strait of Hormuz, an important waterway oil vessels use to transport petroleum to other parts of the world, has been held hostage by Iranian armed guards.
The global volatility and the ensuing petroleum import challenges have driven up the price of gas in California, which averaged $6.13 a gallon on Tuesday. The average price of gas in the state this time last year was $4.78 a gallon, according to AAA. The current national average is $4.48 a gallon, up more than a dollar from last year’s national average of $3.17 a gallon.
