Gas shortages in the United States are rarely caused by a single factor. They typically result from a combination of refinery limitations, distribution bottlenecks, seasonal fuel regulations, and a persistent shortage of tanker truck drivers. Whether you’re seeing empty pumps at your local station or hearing about regional supply crunches, the explanation usually involves several of these forces colliding at once.
The Tanker Driver Shortage
One of the most overlooked causes of gas shortages has nothing to do with oil supply. The fuel delivery industry is short roughly 16% of the drivers it needs on any given day to keep gas stations supplied. That gap means between 10% and 25% of tanker trucks sit idle with no one to drive them, even when fuel is readily available at terminals and refineries.
Hauling gasoline requires a commercial driver’s license with a hazardous materials endorsement, and the pool of qualified drivers has been shrinking for years as older drivers retire faster than new ones enter the field. The result is “spot shortages,” where individual stations run dry not because fuel doesn’t exist, but because no truck arrived to refill the underground tanks. This is especially common in rural areas or during demand spikes like holiday weekends, when delivery schedules can’t keep pace.
Summer Fuel Regulations Tighten Supply
Every year between May 1 and September 15, the EPA requires refineries and fuel distributors to switch to a summer-blend gasoline. This fuel has lower vapor pressure, which cuts down on smog-forming emissions during hot months. The transition sounds routine, but it creates a real squeeze on supply.
Refineries must retool their production process to make the summer blend, which is more expensive and time-consuming to produce. During the switchover period, output temporarily drops. Retailers must comply starting June 1, and stations can’t simply mix leftover winter-blend fuel with the new summer supply. The result is a narrower margin for error in the supply chain, and any disruption during this window, such as a refinery outage or a spike in driving demand, can trigger localized shortages and price jumps.
Refineries Are Running Near Full Capacity
U.S. refineries operated at a 95.7% utilization rate as of late 2025. That number sounds efficient, and it is, but it also means there’s almost no cushion. When refineries are running that close to their ceiling, even a small disruption can ripple through the supply chain.
Planned maintenance, unexpected equipment failures, hurricanes hitting Gulf Coast facilities, or extreme cold snaps that force emergency shutdowns can all knock refineries offline. With so little spare capacity, the system can’t easily absorb the loss. Several older U.S. refineries have permanently closed in recent years, further reducing the total capacity available. The fuel that would have come from those facilities now has to be made up elsewhere, and that’s not always possible on short notice.
Pipeline Disruptions and Regional Vulnerability
The southeastern United States is particularly vulnerable to gas shortages because the region has very few local refineries. States from Alabama to Virginia depend heavily on the Colonial Pipeline, a 5,500-mile system that moves about 2.5 million barrels per day of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel from refineries along the Gulf Coast up to New Jersey.
When Colonial Pipeline was shut down for nearly a week in May 2021 due to a cyberattack, the effects were immediate. Stations across the Southeast ran out of fuel, and panic buying made the problem worse. Because pipeline shipments move at only about five miles per hour, even after service resumed, it took several additional days for fuel to physically reach stations along the route. Coastal cities like Savannah, Charleston, and Norfolk could receive limited marine shipments as a backup, but inland areas had almost no alternative supply.
That incident exposed a structural weakness: much of the East Coast relies on a single pipeline corridor, and any disruption, whether from cyberattacks, maintenance, or severe weather, can create shortages that last well beyond the event itself.
The Strategic Reserve Is Lower Than It Used to Be
The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the government’s emergency stockpile of crude oil stored in underground salt caverns along the Gulf Coast, held about 395 million barrels as of early 2026. That’s significantly below the roughly 700 million barrels it held at peak capacity. The reserve was drawn down substantially in 2022 to help stabilize fuel prices, and refilling it has been a slow process.
A smaller reserve doesn’t directly cause shortages at the pump, but it does reduce the government’s ability to respond quickly to major supply disruptions. If a hurricane knocked out Gulf Coast refineries for weeks, or a geopolitical crisis cut off oil imports, there’s less of a buffer to draw from than there was a few years ago.
Demand Has Shifted but Remains Massive
American gasoline consumption averaged 8.9 million barrels per day in 2023 and 2024, down from the pre-pandemic average of 9.3 million barrels per day between 2016 and 2019. That decline reflects a mix of factors: more remote work, better vehicle fuel efficiency, and growing electric vehicle adoption. But 8.9 million barrels a day is still an enormous amount of fuel, and demand isn’t spread evenly across the year. Summer driving season, hurricane disruptions, and cold-weather heating needs can all create demand spikes that outpace supply in specific regions.
The gap between current demand and pre-pandemic levels might suggest there should be plenty of fuel to go around. But lower demand has also led to less investment in new refining capacity and delivery infrastructure. The system has tightened to match the new normal, which means it has less flexibility when something goes wrong.
Global Factors Play a Role
OPEC+ nations coordinate production limits that influence global oil prices and availability. These agreements hold back what’s known as spare production capacity, essentially oil that could be pumped but isn’t. In 2025, OPEC’s spare capacity increased by about 370,000 barrels per day compared to the prior year, offering some additional global supply cushion. But decisions by oil-producing nations to cut or boost production can shift global prices and availability in ways that affect what Americans pay at the pump.
Europe’s natural gas situation, by contrast, has been relatively stable. As of early 2024, European gas storage was 59% full at the end of the heating season, the highest on record, and 83% above the 13-year average. That stability means European demand hasn’t been pulling global energy supplies away from other markets in the way it did during the worst of the energy crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Why Shortages Hit Some Areas Harder
Gas shortages are almost always regional rather than national. A station running dry in rural Georgia has different causes than high prices in California. The key variables are proximity to refineries, reliance on a single pipeline or delivery route, availability of truck drivers in the area, and local fuel blend requirements that limit which suppliers can serve a given market.
States with their own refining capacity and multiple delivery options, like Texas and Louisiana, rarely experience true shortages. States that depend on long-distance pipeline or truck delivery, with few backup options, are far more exposed. When you add panic buying to the mix, which surged during the Colonial Pipeline shutdown, even a moderate supply hiccup can become a full-blown crisis within hours as drivers top off tanks they wouldn’t normally fill.