War in Iran has US gas prices spiking. Drilling for more oil here won’t fix things

By Ella Nilsen, Amy O’Kruk, Samuel Hart, CNN

(CNN) — The current war in the Middle East has sent the price of oil spiking — and with it, US gas prices.

Crude prices leapt over $100 per barrel on Monday. In the US, the average gas price was $3.48, up 50 cents since the US entered war with Iran.

The current energy crisis underscores an important fact: US gas prices are inseparable from the global oil market. And even though the US is the biggest exporter of oil globally, it can’t make up for the standstill of oil tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, plus Middle East oil stalwarts Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates starting to reduce their production.

While the shale revolution — with new fracking methods extracting more oil from Texas, New Mexico and North Dakota — has pushed the US to become the biggest oil producer in the world, this country has learned the hard way that not all oil is the same. And the US consumes a different kind of oil than we produce.

Oil falls on a spectrum from light to heavy, depending on how much sulfur it contains. The stuff the US extracts from the ground via fracking is an expensive, light crude oil. It made up most of what the US exported around the world in 2025: 3.9 million barrels per day.

Oil experts call it “the champagne of crudes.”

But it’s different from the kind of oil that has powered cars and industry in the US for decades. America was built on a thick, gunky crude that comes from other countries including Canada, Saudi Arabia and Central and South American nations.

“Some crudes are like coffee grounds — they’re gunky, awful, viscous, dirty. Some crudes are like champagne, light and un-sulfurous,” Bob McNally, president of consulting firm Rapidan Energy Group, told CNN in an interview last year.

The US pumps a lot of home-grown champagne out of the ground; around 80% of the oil produced here is light crude, according to the Energy Information Administration.

“It’s much lighter and sweeter,” said Hugh Daigle, an associate professor at the University of Texas Austin and an oil expert. “It’s less viscous.”

Meanwhile, the US uses a lot of “coffee-ground” oil. Last year, we imported around 6.2 million barrels of crude oil a day from others — most of it either heavy- or medium-density. By far the biggest source of US oil imports is its northern neighbor, Canada, which sent around 3.9 million barrels of crude oil per day to America in 2025.

But even though the US gets most of its oil from North American neighbors Canada and Mexico, it’s not immune from the energy disruptions in the Middle East.

For one thing, Saudia Arabia is the third largest oil exporter to the US, sending around 270,000 barrels of oil per day, according to EIA data.

But more importantly, the oil market is a global system.

“Oil is globally priced, and we all ride the same price rollercoaster,” McNally said in a recent interview. “The reality of the global oil market is a supply disruption anywhere leads to a price shock at the pump everywhere — including the US.”

The prices for different grades of crude oil are set in a global market. Even though most of the oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz goes to Asia, the US is far from insulated.

US energy infrastructure can also be impacted. Many US refineries —some of which have been around since the 1930s or earlier — were built decades before America’s light-oil boom and therefore made to handle heavy crude.

Some US refineries have adapted to refine the country’s light, home-grown oil, though it varies by region and geography. For instance, Gulf Coast refineries process mostly domestic oil because they’re relatively close to the Permian basin in Texas and New Mexico. Meanwhile, refineries in Midwestern and Western states are heavily reliant on Canadian oil because it’s also relatively nearby.

The other factors refineries need to consider are the price of crude oil (dirtier and heavier crude is cheaper than lighter), and the end products the refineries are making — everything from gasoline for cars, jet fuel, propane and asphalt.

There’s a lot that goes into oil companies’ business calculations, said Jenna Delaney, a Rapidan Energy Group analyst focusing on global crude.

“It’s complex, it’s regionally specific and it’s a lot more complicated than saying, ‘we produce this crude, we should use all of it and not export any of it,’” Delaney said in an interview last year.

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