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US oil refineries are running at full tilt as wars in the Middle East and Ukraine choke global supplies of fuels, increasing the risk of outages at a time when prices are already rising sharply.
Refineries across the US are running at 96 per cent of their capacity, with those in the Midwest and Rocky Mountains regions operating at 100 per cent, according to the US Energy Information Administration.
US energy companies have stepped up exports of petroleum products, including diesel and jet fuel, to record levels following Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of global oil supplies passed before the Middle East conflict began in February.
While transits through the waterway had increased briefly following a ceasefire between the US and Iran last month, a flare-up in hostilities has again frozen the strait. Houthi rebels have also threatened a Red Sea route that Saudi Arabia is using to get most of its crude to market.
Ukrainian drone strikes on Russia’s infrastructure have at the same time crimped the country’s refining capacity, while Moscow this month banned diesel exports.
In a sign of the tightening market, US wholesale diesel futures have jumped 26 per cent so far this month. The rush for oil products has sent the average per-barrel margin US refiners receive for converting crude into gasoline and diesel to the highest level on record.
High refinery utilisation has helped keep markets supplied and boosted groups such as Valero and Marathon Petroleum, whose stocks have almost doubled since the start of the year. But it has also left the world’s largest oil consumer with little margin for error.
An outage, either caused by a breakdown or natural disaster such as a hurricane, would hit consumers around the world already grappling with high energy costs, analysts warned.
“The US export increase is helping but it’s a band-aid on a big gunshot wound,” said Joe DeLaura, senior energy strategist at Rabobank. “We’re trying to make up this deficit by running all out, but that means the second refineries go down that’s really bad.”
High refinery runs are taking place as there is a sharp drawdown in US strategic reserves.
Washington has released about 77 per cent of the 172mn barrels from the country’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve that it pledged in March to use as a cushion for the supply shock from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and to keep prices low.
The SPR, which is held in underground salt caverns in Texas and Louisiana, has fallen to 311mn barrels, its lowest level since 1983. Its operational minimum, below which further withdrawals risk damaging infrastructure and disrupting pipeline operations, is estimated at 180mn to 200mn barrels, according to industry analysts.
Meanwhile, inventories at America’s largest commercial storage complex in Cushing, Oklahoma, have hovered at around 20mn barrels since the end of June, a level near its operational minimum.
Drained supplies mean Washington is increasingly vulnerable to future supply shocks in the absence of a substantial buffer provided by the releases from the SPR, setting the stage for crude prices to increase significantly when the reserve hits its operational minimum.
“Commercial stocks are at tank bottom, US SPR stocks are potentially going to approach tank bottom, where is the flexibility to react to additional escalations?” said Sean Vale, an energy market analyst at Rystad Energy.
A Wall Street backlash is mounting over a proposal by Donald Trump’s social media company to charge for high-speed access to his posts, as industry executives balk at the fee and raise questions over potential legal jeopardy.
Nasdaq-listed Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns Trump’s social media platform Truth Social, last week announced a new data service that would provide “faster” access to posts from the top accounts on the website within milliseconds. Multiple people familiar with the matter said that access to the service was being touted at a fee of $100,000 a month.
The new venture is the latest way the president has created moneymaking opportunities from his time in the White House. His vast business portfolio earned $2.2bn in 2025 from interests ranging from cryptocurrencies to Bibles, according to a financial disclosure last month.
It has also brought a slew of legal questions for Wall Street, as financial firms and their lawyers try to decipher the potential risks of paying for access to the president’s thoughts and views before anyone else. Multiple lawyers described the product as a legal minefield.
Richard Painter, professor of corporate law at the University of Minnesota and former White House ethics adviser to President George W Bush, said the plan could pose legal risks for firms that subscribe to it.
“If I were the general counsel of any of these institutional investors I would say, ‘Don’t even touch this unless Truth Social will guarantee there will be no advance notice of any posts that contain information about the actions of the United States government,’” he said.
A White House spokesperson declined to comment, referring questions to Trump’s media group. A company spokesperson said: “Truth API offers customers the fastest way to ingest publicly available Truth Social data. Critics must have invented a new theory of ‘insider trading’ based on publicly available information.”
Trump’s Truth Social posts have long been seen by hedge funds and other heavyweight investors as crucial to swings in equity, currency, commodity and bond markets, because policy is so unpredictable under the current administration.
While TMTG’s press release announcing the product doesn’t make direct reference to Trump’s posts, a pitch deck shared with potential clients and seen by the FT documented 10 market-moving posts by the US president.
These included Trump’s post on the “liberation day” tariffs last year which sent stocks down 12 per cent and another about hitting Iran “very hard” in June which sent oil soaring.
The presentation also appeared to tout how some investors placed unusually large trades before he made market-moving announcements, referencing $580mn in bets before Trump’s announcement of productive talks with Iran on March 23 that sent oil prices tumbling.
TMTG said last week that several firms had already signed up, though Trump’s feed has been devoid of posts that clearly had a market impact since the announcement. Trump did not use his Truth Social account to announce his latest tariff scheme on Monday.
Still, lawyers said there could be legal risk in subscribing because of Trump’s $1.1bn stake in the company.
Trump and his White House colleagues “have no business commercialising information that they generate in their official positions,” said James Cox, a law professor at Duke University who specialises in corporate and securities law. Under the proposal to sell fast access to the posts, Trump might be using government information for private benefit, he said.
One lawyer said that while he did not believe financial firms would be at risk of tripping federal rules, the more imminent legal risk would be state attorneys-general, which could independently investigate the product. “State regulators have other tools to go after this type of behaviour,” he said.
The feed has the most potential value for trading firms that specialise in high-speed trading, where gaining an advantage of just a few milliseconds over others can mean big profits.
“His tweets move markets so we all need to pay up,” said a top macro hedge fund executive. “It’s so bad that nothing surprises me in that sense anymore.”
A second macro hedge fund executive called it “scandalous” but suggested that some hedge funds may have to subscribe to the service out of a fiduciary duty to clients, to avoid falling behind competitors.
“It’s a huge misuse of power,” said one crypto trader. “It’s a terrible look . . . not exactly presidential and impartial.”
But others said their strategies did not rely on accessing Trump’s posts milliseconds early.
“It’s milliseconds,” said a third hedge fund executive. “That’s how they get away with it. It’s really not that big of a competitive advantage” for any firm that’s not trading at the “fastest speeds”.
Additional reporting by Alex Rogers in Washington
RUSSIA FORCED TO IMPORT FUEL FROM INDIA
Russia is set to receive a shipment of fuel from India, as Moscow is forced to import petrol after Ukrainian drone attacks destroyed parts of its major refineries.
The shipment underlines the severity of Russia’s fuel shortages after the strikes cut domestic refining capacity by about 40 per cent, prompting one of the world’s largest petrostates to seek relief from abroad.
A tanker carrying 42,000 tonnes of petrol which originated in India’s Vadinar refinery is due to reach Beloye More, an oil terminal in northern Russia, on Sunday, according to data from analytics company Kpler.
Regions across Russia introduced some form of restriction on petrol sales per person this month, after Kyiv’s strikes triggered the worst fuel crisis since the collapse of the Soviet Union. People have had to queue for hours or days to secure fuel in some areas, with the crisis affecting around 50mn Russians, according to an FT estimate.
Moscow officially announced a plan to import fuel in late June, as long queues began forming at petrol stations across the country.
The fuel cargo from the Vadinar refinery was first loaded on to a vessel called Agni at Vadinar on June 18, Kpler data showed.
The tanker transferred its entire cargo to the Garnet at Damietta Light, off Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, on July 6, the data showed. As of July 22, the Garnet was sailing north along the Norwegian coast.
Vadinar is owned by India’s Nayara Energy, in which Russia’s state-controlled Rosneft holds a 49 per cent stake. According to Kpler data, more than 90 per cent of the crude processed at Vadinar in 2026 has come from Russia, adding to the irony of refined Russian crude flowing back from the country that has become its main seaborne importer since 2022.
Nayara said it “has neither sold nor has any plans to sell fuel to Russian companies”, and that it “remains committed to serving the Indian market and meeting the demand for fuels across the length and breadth of India”.
Reuters reported in early July that at least 60,000 tonnes of petrol had been dispatched from India to Russia, equivalent to about 60 per cent of the country’s daily consumption.
The shipment from India due to reach Russia this week appears to be the largest single batch of imported petrol since the fuel crisis erupted, but it is not the only source of foreign fuel Russia is now using.
Belarus, which mainly refines Russian crude, has also significantly increased its petrol sales to Moscow. In June, it sold Russia 184,000 tonnes, a threefold increase month on month and a 184-fold increase year on year, according to Russia-based Price Benchmark Centre data shared with the FT.
Alexander Novak, Russia’s vice-premier overseeing the energy sector, confirmed the start of imports of “oil products” on July 8.
Speaking at a televised meeting on economic issues on Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin mentioned the fuel crisis, but said the “difficulties” were “temporary” and would not change the “overall economic dynamics”.
Imports, together with other state measures such as lowering fuel quality requirements and adapting logistics, helped Russia ease the crisis, especially in Moscow and St Petersburg, said Janis Kluge, a Russia expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
People have also adapted, reducing demand, while independent fuel stations have raised prices to European levels. As a result, since last week several regions have lifted previously imposed restrictions and queues at fuel stations there have shortened.
But in others, such as the southern city of Astrakhan or the western cities of Lipetsk and Voronezh, queues of more than 50 or even 100 cars are still being reported, according to local media.
In Ulyanovsk on the Volga river, the situation had worsened, Kluge’s analysis of Russian platforms showing petrol availability by accumulating user-generated data showed, probably as a result of the authorities rerouting some volumes to priority regions.
Additional reporting by Chris Kay in Mumbai
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