Ringside: Can EVs Make Up for Gasoline Shortages?

If he hasn’t done so already, California Governor Gavin Newsom needs to demand the state legislature rescind the so-called “ABX2-1” passed on October 14, 2024 in an effort to prevent “price gouging.” If the legislature does not cooperate, Newsom needs to declare a state of emergency and suspend the law. Because if he does not, he will lose whatever remaining chance he has to become U.S. President, and more to the point, Californians could be in sitting in gas lines starting sometime next year.

These numbers don’t lie: California’s oil refineries produce 1.62 million gallons per day of CARB compliant gasoline and diesel fuel. Statewide consumer demand is 1.39 million gallons per day, meaning supply capacity exceeds demand by a healthy 16 percent. That is a necessary cushion, as proven by the fire in PBF’s Martinez refinery this past February, which has taken 156,000 BBL/day out of production for the next several months, reducing surplus capacity to 5.1 percent.

This 16 percent surplus will not last. In a remarkable coincidence, the same week that ABX2-1 was passed, Phillips 66 announced they would close their refinery in Long Beach by the end of 2025. That will take 139,000 BBL/day out of production, lowering surplus capacity to a thin 6.3 percent.

And last week, Valero served notice to the government of California that, in the first half of 2026, it will shut down at least one of its refineries, starting with the one in Benicia that produces 145,000 BBL/day. Surely the timing of this, too, was a coincidence. But regardless of motive, once it happens, demand for gasoline in California will exceed refinery capacity by 4.1 percent.

Will Newsom fix this? Or will California endure a politically engineered, accelerated shift towards EVs? And if so, and we assume this 4.1 percent deficit in our supply of gasoline and diesel fuel is made up for through the adoption of EVs in 2026, how much additional electricity would we need?

To begin with, a 4.1 percent gap between demand and supply is equal to 57,045 BBL/day, which is 20.8 million BBL/year, or 875 million gallons. California leads the nation with an average MPG of 33.5, which means electricity would have to power 29.3 billion miles of new EV mileage. If the real-world performance of EVs is about 3.0 miles per kilowatt-hour, it would require roughly another 10,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity to be produced by California’s generating plants.

That’s a lot, but Californians consume not quite 300,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity per year. So maybe this additional electricity could be delivered without brownouts. But what about EV sales? According to the 2024 Kelley Blue Book, the average Californian drives 11,409 miles per year. That means to cover 29.3 billion miles of mileage no longer fueled by gasoline, Californians would have to purchase 2.6 million new EVs.

This may be good news for the EV industry, but here again, capacity may not exist to sell that many of them, even if that many buyers could afford them. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, of the 30.8 million cars and light trucks on the road in California, only 1.6 million are “BEVs,” that is, pure battery-electric vehicles and not including hybrids that combine gasoline and electric propulsion.

These facts underscore a few points that ought to give the green accelerationist lobby reason for pause:

First, at around 6,000 gigawatt-hours per year, the amount of electricity that EVs currently demand from California’s power grid is not yet a significant percentage of total electricity generated, but that’s because EVs represent only 5 percent of the total registered cars and light trucks in California.

Second, generating capacity is only part of the challenge. Even the presence of just 1.6 million EVs has strained the grid’s distribution capacity. Imagine the challenge of tripling the number of EV chargers, and the power lines and transformers needed to power all of them, whether they were at-home or accessible to the public.

Third, there is no possible way that 2.6 million EVs are going to be sold in a single year. In 2024, after ten years of explosive growth, sales of BEVs leveled off, with the 378,000 vehicles sold nearly unchanged from 374,000 sales in 2023. It may be that, at least for now, most Californians who can afford the cost of an EV and are indifferent to its remaining impracticalities have already bought one.

California’s oil industry has several sectors. There are the refineries, the distributors, and the drillers. In the face of unrelenting regulatory assaults, they are starting to fight back. The refiners are either voting with their feet and getting out, as is the case with Phillips 66, or threatening to vote with their feet, as is the case with Valero. Others may follow.

As for the owners of producing wells, as announced by a coalition of California mineral owners on April 17, “California mineral owners filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Senate Bill 1137, a law they claim authorizes the unprecedented and unlawful seizure of property rights for everyday Californians.” This is a case to watch carefully.

The energy reality in California is that 50 percent of California’s energy remains petroleum based. According to the US Energy Information Agency, “California is the largest consumer of jet fuel and second-largest consumer of motor gasoline among the 50 states.” And yet California’s oil industry, across all sectors, is on the verge of collapse, and the cause is entirely driven by politics in Sacramento.

The moral case to save California’s oil industry isn’t a stretch. It boils down to this: As long as Californians lack the money, the technology, and the infrastructure to transition away from petroleum in a manner that doesn’t impose unreasonable hardships on its residents or its businesses, it ought to be drilling and refining petroleum in-state as much as possible. Instead, California imports 75 percent of its oil from nations with almost no protections for workers or the environment.

A related, and equally compelling moral challenge to California’s legislators would be for them to honestly evaluate the environmental footprint of renewables. From the environmental havoc wreaked by offshore wind and biofuel plantations to the mad worldwide rush to mine minerals for batteries, renewables are often hardly renewable.

Newsom has a big choice in front of him. Either he steps on some very big green toes, or he risks gas lines from here to 2028.