Opinion: West Coast and Alaska will pay a price for Trump’s war

Published 1:30 am Friday, May 22, 2026

This is more about who will pay the cost of the president’s war on Iran and how it’s disrupting the global flow of oil than it is a history lesson about Alaska oil production. But stay with me as I run through the history to get to my point.

Think of it like setting the handle on the gas pump to fill up your tank and watching as the dollars spin by on the screen.

Decades ago, Alaska’s North Slope produced so much oil that the supply overwhelmed U.S. West Coast refineries. It required a choreographed system of tankers, barges and pipelines to find homes for all that crude, delivering to refineries as far away as the U.S. Gulf Coast; Albany, New York, up the Hudson River; and the U.S. Virgin Islands in the Caribbean.

That was then but it’s not now.

The West Coast consumes a lot more gasoline, diesel and jet fuel today than it did when Alaska oil production peaked at 2 million barrels a day in 1988. The growth in demand — California has added 10 million residents since 1988 — along with a decline in North Slope and California oil production required refineries to look elsewhere for enough crude.

The oil tide turned about a decade ago, when imports to West Coast refineries surpassed domestic crude from California, Alaska, and even some by rail from North Dakota.

Last year, tankers unloaded an average of 225,000 barrels a day from Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates at West Coast refineries, about the same as California produced. Those Persian Gulf deliveries were about half as much as Alaska supplied. Canada was the No. 1 foreign supplier, at an average of almost 370,000 barrels a day.

Brazil, Ecuador and Argentina also have been significant suppliers of crude to California refineries.

But even all that imported crude has not been enough to meet the needs of drivers ad flyers, factories and other fuel consumers. So, the West Coast states started to rely more heavily on imports of refined fuels.

The closure of several California oil refineries in the past few years, or their conversion to making biofuels, added to the reliance on imports of gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and other products ready to pump into the tank.

South Korea sent an average of 110,000 barrels a day of refined products to the West Coast last year — about 75% of that was jet fuel. Canada refineries delivered an average of 86,000 barrels a day; India, about 38,000 barrels a day. Add in a couple of smaller suppliers and it adds up to more than 250,000 barrels a day.

All this matters because Alaska gets a significant fill of refined fuels from U.S. West Coast refiners and foreign suppliers, particularly Korea.

Which brings me to my point. Alaska is far away from the Persian Gulf, but we are not immune to the financial strain the war is causing.

The president’s decision to keep pressing the fight against Iran means that any oil and refined fuels available on the global marketplace are commanding higher prices as refiners need to replace the crude stuck in the Persian Gulf. Which means Alaska, California and Washington state consumers will need to pay higher prices or lose the supplies to someone else who will pay the price.

The moral of the story will hurt the morale of Alaskans when they fill up their car or truck, fishing boat or airplane or heating oil tank this fall: We may not care how they do it Outside but we are connected to the world.

Larry Persily is a longtime Alaska journalist, with breaks for federal, state and municipal public policy work in Alaska and Washington, D.C. He lives in Anchorage and is publisher of the Wrangell Sentinel weekly newspaper.