California Gas Prices Could Surge to $10 a Gallon, Lawmaker Warns

California could see gas prices spike as high as $10 per gallon due to multiple refinery shutdowns and U.S. involvement in the Middle East, a state lawmaker is warning.

“I believe we could very easily be around $10 gas. … It’s about to get worse if we don’t do anything about it,” Assemblyman David Tangipa, R-Fresno, said in an interview with the Daily Signal. 

“We have become extremely reliant on foreign imports. The last tanker from the Middle East that left the Strait of Hormuz arrived about 10 days ago. Now we aren’t getting anything from some of these foreign markets.”

Critics of the war with Iran argue that the GOP did not take gas prices into consideration when assessing the conflict. California Gov. Gavin Newsom referred to it as “Trump’s Iran war” and blamed the president for higher prices.

“Trump’s Iran war is costing Americans $1.5 billion more at the pump this week alone, and what are Americans getting in return? Not better roads. Not cleaner air. Just higher prices as corporations pocket the higher prices and cash in on Trump’s chaos,” he said.

“‘Drill, baby, drill’ was always a lie to enrich Trump’s Big Oil donors—not a strategy to keep prices low, because oil is a global good with a global price,” Newsom added.

Tangipa, however, said shutting down two major oil refineries in California, Valero Benicia and Phillips 66, is also to blame, and that the way to mitigate extreme price increases is to bring oil production back to California. 

“California has some of the largest reserves in the entire world—it has some of the cleanest oil,” he said. “… Instead of using California resources, we are depending on foreign nations to not have any conflict.”

“What we really need to do is reactivate a lot of the oil wells that are here, and we need to work with a lot of our partners to make sure that we’re stabilizing our own supply,” he added.

According to the Western States Petroleum Association, California imports 70 percent of crude oil to meet its energy needs, despite once leading the nation in production.

According to the State of California Capitol Museum website, “Between 1903 and 1936, the Golden State was the country’s leading oil producer, with many California companies dominating the market.”

Tangipa warned that gas price increases are not the only thing Californians have to worry about; the cost of flights also will be affected.

“We import a lot of aviation fuel. I’ve met with the airlines, and they are telling me that because it’s getting scarce, your cost for flights is about to go up significantly,” he said.

“Especially with people going on vacations and starting to drive around, if our reserves start to shrink exponentially faster, there may be a gas crisis and an extreme shortage like they saw in the 1970s.”