Posted on February 19, 2026
The Bahamas isn’t the story, nor is the Jones Act—California refinery closures and policies are.
Recent news coverage of refined fuel moving to California via tankers from the Bahamas misses the point. The Bahamas is not even really a refining hub anymore it’s a storage, blending and transshipment hub. It stores and then blends already refined oil from the Gulf Coast or aywhere else in the world. The reason California is importing more gasoline and diesel is simple: California has been steadily shutting down its own refining capacity.
Over the past several years, Marathon’s Martinez refinery, Phillips 66 Rodeo, and Phillips 66 Santa Maria have exited crude oil refining. Phillips 66’s Los Angeles refinery is scheduled to cease operations, and Valero’s Benicia refinery has announced plans to shut down in 2026. Each of these closures permanently removes California Air Resources Board (CARB-compliant) gasoline and diesel from the market.
With little or no refined-product pipelines feeding California and fuel standards that most North American refineries don’t meet, supply is replaced by tanker-ship imports. Those barrels are typically refined in South Korea, Singapore, Japan, India, and occasionally Europe, with Canada playing only a limited role. Even Canada doesn’t play the CARB game. Canada refines for mid-America.
The Bahamas appears in the headlines because (1) it is a convenient product staging point in the global supply chain (2) U.S. refineries outside CA don’t make CARB compliant gasoline/diesel for California and (3) sloppy reporting by major news outlets who don’t understand the Jones Act, but like to try and showcase it as being responsible for nuclear winters.
This is not a Jones Act problem. It is the predictable outcome of shrinking refining capacity combined with California’s CARB fuel requirements. As California continues to dismantle its petroleum refining base without replacing it or allowing pipelines into the state, then imported fuel, regardless of flag or routing, becomes unavoidable.
