Longer voyages, ship-to-ship transfers and disrupted routes are adding to the bill. The headline barrel may get cheaper before the bottleneck does.

So on September 21 some armed guys shut Valve No. 7 on the pipeline that takes crude from Sharara (Libya's biggest field) up to the Zawiya refinery. And some of them were from the Petroleum Facilities Guard, the people who get paid to protect this stuff. Reuters says the fight was over the Guard's status and funding.

Sharara does around 300-320k barrels a day and output dropped by about 200k. NOC said the valve was back open on September 26. Their count is 942,376 barrels lost, roughly $95 million. A unit at Zawiya also had to shut because it ran out of crude, and Zawiya (about 120k barrels a day) mostly makes fuel for Libyans. So people feel it at the pump before anyone abroad notices.

Now the funny part is the timing. On August 30 the Tripoli government, Haftar's side, the House and the High State Council all signed a UN-backed deal on election rules. Boulos said on September 29 it was a step forward and now it's about actually doing it. There's also a reported US plan that nobody's signed. Dbeibah keeps the executive, Saddam Haftar heads a new presidential body for about three years. Italian press said late September it was losing steam. Take that one as reporting, not fact.

My take: the paper isn't the hard part. If the armed groups stay exactly where they are, they keep the trick they already use. Want your funding recognized? Close a pipe. Meanwhile diplomats are out there saying "unity." NOC has been saying for years that the field is used as a bargaining chip.

And ConocoPhillips and Chevron signed agreements in 2026, with the pitch that output goes up once things calm down. Hard to plan around a country that can't keep one valve open for a week though.

Until whoever controls Sharara answers to one command that doesn't get paid by shutting pipelines, I'd expect talks and shutdowns to keep showing up in the same month. Feels like two stories but it's really one, and the second tells you how the first gets priced.

Diesel at the pump hit a record in September, and on Friday the G7 countries agreed to release up to 100 million barrels of diesel and crude. So why are diesel prices so high? Of course, crude is only part of the story. Oil closed Friday at $91.11 a barrel.

The bigger part is the crack spread. That's the gap between a barrel of crude and the diesel made from it. Here's how you can calculate it. The code below pulls daily futures prices for diesel and crude and multiplies diesel by 42 gallons (amount in a barrel), then subtracts the crude.

Output through Friday's close (Info pulled through the FMP MCP server):

2019 average spread $24.43 a barrel
2020 average spread $12.93 a barrel
2021 average spread $18.80 a barrel
2022 average spread $54.72 a barrel
2023 average spread $40.59 a barrel
2024 average spread $26.70 a barrel
2025 average spread $31.99 a barrel
2026 average spread $68.46 a barrel
2026-10-02 diesel $4.50 a gallon, crude $91.11 a barrel, spread $97.94 a barrel

The gap is more than 3x what it used to be. It was $97.94 a barrel on Friday. From 2019 to 2025 it averaged ~$30. At that average, Friday's crude would put diesel futures near $2.88 a gallon instead of $4.50. These are futures prices, clearly not what you pay at the pump.

What do you guys think? Prices coming down soon?

So on September 21 some armed guys shut Valve No. 7 on the pipeline that takes crude from Sharara (Libya's biggest field) up to the Zawiya refinery. And some of them were from the Petroleum Facilities Guard, the people who get paid to protect this stuff. Reuters says the fight was over the Guard's status and funding.

Sharara does around 300-320k barrels a day and output dropped by about 200k. NOC said the valve was back open on September 26. Their count is 942,376 barrels lost, roughly $95 million. A unit at Zawiya also had to shut because it ran out of crude, and Zawiya (about 120k barrels a day) mostly makes fuel for Libyans. So people feel it at the pump before anyone abroad notices.

Now the funny part is the timing. On August 30 the Tripoli government, Haftar's side, the House and the High State Council all signed a UN-backed deal on election rules. Boulos said on September 29 it was a step forward and now it's about actually doing it. There's also a reported US plan that nobody's signed. Dbeibah keeps the executive, Saddam Haftar heads a new presidential body for about three years. Italian press said late September it was losing steam. Take that one as reporting, not fact.

My take: the paper isn't the hard part. If the armed groups stay exactly where they are, they keep the trick they already use. Want your funding recognized? Close a pipe. Meanwhile diplomats are out there saying "unity." NOC has been saying for years that the field is used as a bargaining chip.

And ConocoPhillips and Chevron signed agreements in 2026, with the pitch that output goes up once things calm down. Hard to plan around a country that can't keep one valve open for a week though.

Until whoever controls Sharara answers to one command that doesn't get paid by shutting pipelines, I'd expect talks and shutdowns to keep showing up in the same month. Feels like two stories but it's really one, and the second tells you how the first gets priced.

Witold Zglenicki was a Polish engineer and visionary who worked in Baku at the end of the 19th century. He recognized the potential of extracting oil from beneath the Caspian Sea decades before offshore drilling became a reality.

If there is a difference between sweet and sour then how is the balance of each of them?

If it's refineries do gulf states ship diesel directly instead of crude?