California Gov. Gavin Newsom spent last week on the global stage in Munich repeating his familiar talking points to attack U.S. oil and gas companies, but a recent Bloomberg report underscores a more uncomfortable reality for the nation’s biggest state: gasoline refined in the United States is increasingly being shipped out of the country to the Bahamas and then shipped back thousands of miles to California to help cover a growing in-state supply gap.
It’s a routing choice that adds time, complexity, and cost to an already expensive market, while simultaneously highlighting the logistical consequences of Newsom’s policies that have driven refining closures, resulting in a surge of 40 cents per gallon this month for drivers across the state.
Think of the carbon footprint of this arrangement. Congrats on the “progress”! https://t.co/TwDd78wytl
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) February 15, 2026
Detour to the Bahamas
According to Bloomberg, California imported more gasoline in November than ever before, and more than 40 percent of those imports came from the Bahamas:
“Last year, California sourced more barrels of gasoline from the Bahamas than it had in the prior nine years combined – accounting for roughly 12 percent of gasoline arriving in California by ship all year, including direct deliveries from elsewhere in the US, according to Vortexa.”
Bloomberg describes U.S. gasoline supplies leaving the country, moving via the Bahamas, and then ending up in California, driven by shrinking in-state refining capacity and no pipeline network connecting the Gulf Coast to the West Coast. The strange route is a way to sidestep requirements of the Jones Act, which requires goods shipped between U.S. ports to travel on U.S.-built, U.S.-owned, U.S.-crewed vessels.
That’s where the Bahamas detour comes in:
“One of the most recent voyages was made by the Singapore-flagged Silver Moon, which delivered nearly 300,000 barrels of gasoline blendstock to the Los Angeles area in early January after loading in Freeport in mid-December. […]
Earlier this month, the Torm Dulce made the same voyage and delivered gasoline blendstock to San Francisco.”
As Energy in Depth has documented, back in 2020 Newsom admitted that California’s shrinking in-state oil production was not causing a drop in consumption but rather was simply being replaced by oil imported from foreign countries that, similar to the gasoline now being routed through the Bahamas, comes a much higher carbon footprint:
“As it relates to managing decline, we’ve got to address the issue of demand. California since 1985 has declined its production by 60 percent, but we’ve only seen a modest decrease in demand by 4.4 percent. Sixty percent decline in production, but only a 4.4 percent decline in demand. And that means we are making up for a lack of domestic production from Saudi Arabia, Ecuador, and Colombia. And that’s hardly an environmental solution when you look globally.”
In 2024, nearly 64 percent of the oil used in California’s refineries came from foreign countries, with most crude oil imports originating in Iraq (21.26 percent) and Brazil (20.41 percent), according to the California Energy Commission. In 1985, nearly 62 percent of this oil originated in California.
Source: California Energy Commission
Source: California Energy Commission
Meanwhile, Newsom Flew to Munich to Attack Big Oil
Despite this well-documented reality, Newsom reverted to familiar talking points at the Munich Security Conference, attacking the American oil and gas industry as “the polluted heart of the climate crisis” and reviving rhetoric he has largely avoided at home amid California’s ongoing refining and fuel supply challenges.
It’s a striking juxtaposition for a governor that has backed the state into a corner where:
- Demand hasn’t disappeared, especially for transportation fuel
- Local supply is tighter as refineries retire or face outages
- No Gulf-to-West pipeline backstop exists
- Shipping constraints make “domestic” barrels expensive, so markets route “domestic” barrels through foreign ports.
- Drivers consistently pay for the highest gasoline prices in the country
BOTTOM LINE: Newsom can villainize American oil and gas all he wants abroad, but California still needs affordable and reliable energy, and when policies shrink in-state capacity without replacement infrastructure, the result is a supply chain that gets longer, costlier, and results in higher emissions.
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