What (if anything) to do about California gasoline price spikes
Here we go again. A couple refinery disruptions, a pipeline shutdown, and before you know it gas prices in California have jumped more than 50 cents compared to the rest of the country. Soon politicians will be wringing their hands and calling for investigations. Some will blame it on evil oil companies, while others while say it’s due to our insistence on using a different gasoline than other states.
Those calling for investigations will suggest that the refiners are using the problems at a couple refineries as an excuse to raise prices. It’s important to remember that this is a commodity market, so the only way a seller can drive up price is by withholding some supply from the market. That’s what we know happened during the California electricity crisis. Something similar, though much less extreme, could be happening today in gasoline. BUT it is much more difficult to diagnose such behavior in the extremely complex refinery business – where multiple processes are used to produce a variety of different outputs – than in the relatively simple electricity generation business — where natural gas goes in and electricity comes out. In fact, proving such occasional acts of “exercising market power” (as economists call it) from market data is pretty much hopeless in refining. Furthermore, even if we could tell when a gasoline refiner was doing it, as long as they acted alone — not colluding with rivals — it would not be illegal. 
On the other hand (just as with the California electricity crisis), the observers who say they are certain this is just the supply and demand workings of a competitive market are making a statement of faith, not analysis. The fact is that production of California specification gasoline (“CARB gasoline”) is very concentrated, with Chevron serving more than 20% of the market and a couple other companies with shares in the high teens. Given the very-low elasticity of demand for gasoline, in the short run, it could very well be profitable for a company to produce a bit less CARB gas in order to drive up prices. It’s not a crazy notion; it’s just extremely difficult to prove and, even then, not a violation of any law. Jim Bushnell, Matt Lewis and I examined these issues in a 2004 working paper. The numbers have changed a bit since then, but the basic analysis is the same.
Other commentators will argue that the problem is for California’s use of its own boutique gas blend, which is not used anywhere else, rather than the federal standard for reformulation. They point out, correctly, that our inability to trade gas with neighboring states mean that there is less buffer when supply is disrupted in California. The problem with this view is that a recent paper by Max Auffhammer and Ryan Kellogg has shown that California blend gasoline has significantly greater health benefits than gasoline that only meets the federal standard, benefits that almost certainly exceed the extra costs we pay.
So what can Californians do to protect themselves from these sudden gasoline price shocks? One answer is to just buck up and deal with it. These California-specific spikes don’t happen that often and they usually don’t last too long. That might be my view if I were confident that the spikes weren’t caused or exacerbated by market power. But the potential that these jumps are not entirely due to real supply/demand imbalances means that a policy to short circuit the spikes at some point could be beneficial.
Steve Stoft and I proposed a solution in a 1999 San Francisco Chronicle op-ed. I think it applies just as well today. California could pass an automatic waiver policy that allows any company to sell conventional gasoline if it pays a surcharge of, say, 25 cents per gallon. The surcharge would be substantially larger than the normal production cost differential, which is generally thought to be 10-15 cents. So, in normal times, no firm would want to exercise this option. But when a supply disruption occurred, and California wholesale prices shot up more than 25 cents above our neighbors, some refiners or marketers would be allowed to sell in California the non-CARB gas they normally ship to neighbors, so long as they pay the surcharge. The effect would be to cap the price differential at about 25 cents per gallon. It would also short-circuit the incentive of a CARB gas producer to withhold supply if the impact would just be to trigger sales of non-CARB gas.
What would this do to air quality? Practically nothing. Just as a small shortage drives our prices through the roof, a small quantity of non-CARB gas would drive our prices back down. Even during spikes, the non-CARB gas would be no more than a few percent of the state supply. But these spikes are rare, and usually brief, so the overall impact on health would be miniscule. Still, when it did happen the revenue from the waiver fees could be used to offset the increased pollution. A good place to start would be to buy back more of the old polluters on the road, those pre-1976 cars that in California (for some reason I still can’t fathom) are exempt from emissions checks. That would make the policy a win-win.
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Severin Borenstein View All
Severin Borenstein is Professor of the Graduate School in the Economic Analysis and Policy Group at the Haas School of Business and Faculty Director of the Energy Institute at Haas. He received his A.B. from U.C. Berkeley and Ph.D. in Economics from M.I.T. His research focuses on the economics of renewable energy, economic policies for reducing greenhouse gases, and alternative models of retail electricity pricing. Borenstein is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, MA. He served on the Board of Governors of the California Power Exchange from 1997 to 2003. During 1999-2000, he was a member of the California Attorney General's Gasoline Price Task Force. In 2012-13, he served on the Emissions Market Assessment Committee, which advised the California Air Resources Board on the operation of California’s Cap and Trade market for greenhouse gases. In 2014, he was appointed to the California Energy Commission’s Petroleum Market Advisory Committee, which he chaired from 2015 until the Committee was dissolved in 2017. From 2015-2020, he served on the Advisory Council of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. Since 2019, he has been a member of the Governing Board of the California Independent System Operator.
Energy Institute Blog 
I have a very different perspective on gasoline prices tied to a dysfunctional crude oil market. I believe that a misunderstanding of the global crude oil market and ineffective functioning of “free-market” vehicle fuels markets in the US (and other major oil consuming nations) has resulted in poor decisions purchasing vehicles and vehicle fuels, and other equipment or systems consuming oil products. This currently results in a misallocation of investments, plus excessive cost premiums on purchased oil, that exceeds one $trillion due to purchase decisions made annually in the US.
If the US threw out the free-market crude oil market model, and used a customer needs based model that gave private sector vehicle manufacturers, biofuel producers, and other suppliers of systems that reduced oil demand, a portion of crude oil cost savings; the resulting system could easily collapse oil prices to less than $40 per barrel within a relatively short timeframe (less than five years, and perhaps within two years). The oil refining margin would collapse as well.
I have two posts on my site explaining this, and would welcome a response and some help from an economist, expert in oil markets.
I have set up a site where I placed a couple of presentations covering the policies I am recommending. There are two posts, with the first covering the dysfunctional crude oil market, and the high cost of each incremental cost of oil. The current cost ranges from a low cost premium of $200-600 per barrel based only on US imported oil, to a higher cost estimate ranging from $950-$1400 per barrel, if the total premium cost to industrial nations is considered.
Clearly increased demand for oil costs global oil customers dearly. The cost savings of introducing electric vehicles is approximately $100k to $140k over the lifetime of each vehicle, and this cost savings easily exceeds the increased cost for these vehicles. Biofuels show similar cost savings, which easily exceeds the cost of introducing biofuels.
The second post suggests forming a Green Energy Group, to identify, direct, and implement these changes, coupled with policies addressing green power and shale gas.
I really think you should look at the pdf deck in the second post. I believe the policies in the deck work much better than existing solutions proposed to mitigate carbon emissions, while at the same time cutting household energy costs in half.
The big economic cost issue is the vehicle fuels market, which begins with this presentation:
The largest engineering economics mistake ever made?
The energy policies are covered in this presentation:
‘Customers First’ Green Energy Policy Proposal
It sounds like Jerry’s Brown’s instructions to the Air Quality Board to switch immediately to cheaper winter blend, although on a one-time basis, amounted to the same thing you suggest. It’s interesting that no sooner had his recommendation been approved than prices dropped substantially. Meaning presumably even before winter blend actually arrived at gas stations.
“small quantity of non-CARB gas would drive our prices back down”
I remember years ago it was assumed a “small quantity” of energy would flow through a certain electricity balancing market readers of this site may know.