US president Donald Trump will meet with "small, mid-size, and large" US refiners at the White House on Tuesday to discuss fuel prices, interior secretary Doug Burgum said.
The discussions will include supply chain issues as well as "getting back to a policy where we're actually supporting refiners as opposed to try to run them out of business", Burgum said Monday in a broadcast interview with Fox Business.
The White House meeting comes as US fuel prices, especially distillates, have soared since late February because of global supply shortages caused by the US-Iran war, as well as Ukraine's drone campaign against Russian refineries.
US refiners, who have helped fill the gap in global supply, reported bumper profits in the second quarter with margins doubling from a year earlier. US refiners are running at utilization rates above 97pc in recent weeks, trying to take advantage of the higher prices, according to US Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates. Some US refiners have also postponed maintenance projects to next year to keep running plants at high levels.
The Trump administration has taken steps that it believes will ease domestic fuel prices ahead of the midterm elections in November, including a continuing waiver of the Jones Act shipping law and large releases from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but prices continue to average far above year-earlier levels.
US retail gasoline prices averaged $4.085/USG in the week ended 24 August, up by $1.15/USG from the week ended 23 February, before the US-Israel strikes on Iran, according to EIA data.
US diesel prices averaged a four-year high of $5.652/USG in the week ended 24 August, up by $1.84/USG from the week ended 23 February.
Burgum said that the Jones Act waiver helped lower the prices of gasoline in the US northeast but that there is a "series of other red tape and regulations" that have been added in some states, like California, that are "designed to choke out refining of hydrocarbons in America".
The Jones Act waiver, which was extended by another 90 days on 10 August with some new requirements, allows shippers to transport oil and other energy-related products from one US port to another without using US-built, US-crewed and US-flagged ships, as the 1920 Jones Act requires.
The Trump administration also issued an emergency waiver earlier this month allowing winter gasoline blends to be sold about two weeks earlier, in another attempt to tackle the surge in fuel prices.
