Sacramento tried to dress it up as “market reality,” but on the ground it sounded like a warning siren.

Standing behind a lectern with the Capitol’s marble calmness doing its best to hide the panic, California’s top office finally said the quiet part out loud: gas prices are going up in 2026—not because drivers suddenly got greedy, not because stations are “price gouging,” but because the state is about to lose a huge chunk of its ability to make its own gasoline.

And once that happens, California doesn’t just pay more. California waits.

Waits for tankers. Waits for blending components. Waits for ports. Waits for a special fuel recipe nobody else uses.

Waits while the price sign flips like a slot machine.

“Tell me how I’m supposed to get to work,” one commuter snapped at a pump in the East Bay, jabbing a finger at the numbers as they clicked upward. “I’m not asking for a miracle. I’m asking not to get robbed every time I fill up.”

A man in a work jacket standing nearby gave a humorless laugh. “You think this is bad? You haven’t seen what happens when they start closing refineries.”

That’s the part officials can’t outrun. Two major shutdowns are coming like a one-two punch, and the calendar is already marked.

First: Phillips 66’s Los Angeles refinery, set to shut down by the end of 2025, taking roughly 139,000 barrels per day offline—about 8.3% of California’s refining capacity by the numbers being circulated. Then: Valero’s Benicia refinery, scheduled to close in April 2026, removing another 145,000 barrels per day.

That’s not a minor haircut. That’s a limb.

And as a USC professor’s analysis making the rounds claims, if California loses around 20% of its gasoline production capacity, the dominoes don’t fall politely. They fall like a stampede—shortages, import scrambles, and the kind of price spikes people usually associate with disaster movies.

The number that set social media on fire is the one nobody can stop repeating: $843 per gallon.

Eight hundred. Forty-three.

It sounds like a typo. It sounds like someone forgot a decimal point. It sounds like clickbait—until you listen to how the scenario is explained: not as a “prediction” in the normal sense, but as a mathematical stress test of a system that already runs hot, tight, and twitchy.

“California is not like the rest of America,” one fuel-market analyst told me, sounding exhausted before the first question even landed. “When you break it here, you don’t patch it with a pipeline. You patch it with ships.”

And there’s the trap: California runs on a special gasoline blend called CARBOB—a California-only formula with strict requirements on oxygen content, sulfur, benzene, and evaporation limits. It’s not just “gas.” It’s a state-mandated recipe that refineries have to be equipped to make, and even the recipe itself changes with the seasons.

“You can’t just call Texas and say, ‘Send some extra,’” the analyst said. “There’s no pipeline from the Gulf Coast to bail you out. So when California comes up short, it’s tankers across the Pacific, weeks of lead time, and a prayer nothing goes wrong at sea, at port, or at the blending terminal.”

CARBOB doesn’t arrive as a neat, finished product every time, either. Often it comes in pieces—alkylate and reformate, key blending components—stuff that has to be mixed precisely at terminals before it ever reaches a pump. Miss the spec by a hair, and the load can’t be sold. A shipment can travel thousands of miles only to be treated like poison when it lands.

One terminal worker in Southern California put it in plain English: “If we mess it up, the whole batch is trash. And everybody feels it.”

California has already been leaning on imports like a crutch. The numbers being cited in your brief paint a picture of growing dependence: imports averaging over 100,000 barrels per day, surging during pinch points, with cargoes arriving from places most drivers wouldn’t even associate with their morning commute—India, South Korea, the UK, and even odd routing through hubs like the Bahamas when logistics get weird.

A veteran longshoreman at a Southern California port described the new reality with a shrug that didn’t fool anyone. “People think gas just shows up,” he said. “Nope. It shows up on a schedule. And if the schedule slips? You’ll see it on those signs the same day.”

The governor’s admission that prices will rise in 2026 isn’t shocking because Californians are naïve. It’s shocking because it’s the closest anyone in power has come to saying, We’re about to be structurally short.

Because here’s what happens after those refineries go dark, according to the scenario you outlined: California’s fuel deficit could land somewhere between millions of gallons per day—a gap so big that even if global suppliers wanted to help, not many can. Only a limited number of refineries worldwide can reliably produce California-spec material without major retrofits.

And then come the choke points.

The blending terminals weren’t designed for permanent dependence on foreign feedstock. Storage tanks have to keep components separated. Dock capacity becomes the new heartbeat of the state. A late ship, a storm in the Pacific, a jam at the port, a quality failure in a batch—any of it can ripple outward like an electric shock.

“We’re one bad week away from chaos,” a refinery contractor told me, staring down at his coffee like it had offended him. “People don’t understand. This isn’t like losing one store in a city. It’s like losing the bakery that makes the bread and pretending the shelves will stay full.”

And it’s not just California. Your brief points out a spillover effect that’s already making neighbors nervous: Nevada and Arizona rely on fuel that moves through California’s system, meaning when California’s supply tightens, the pressure doesn’t stay inside state lines. Nevada has no refineries of its own. Arizona has its own requirements in places. Either way, when the West Coast supply chain starts coughing, the whole region starts checking its pulse.

Then there are the jobs—1,300 direct refinery roles tied to the two closures in your summary, with a multiplier effect that could push the total impact toward 3,000 when contractors and suppliers get pulled under. In refinery towns, that’s not an abstract statistic. That’s mortgage payments. That’s local diners going quiet. That’s schools losing donations. That’s the little league sponsor disappearing.

Outside a diner not far from one of the affected facilities, a worker in oil-stained boots said what politicians never do. “They’ll call it ‘transition.’ I call it ‘gone.’”

Online, the reactions are already splitting into predictable camps—and getting uglier by the hour.

One viral post read: “California invented a gas recipe nobody else can cook, then closed the kitchen.”

Another shot back: “We chose cleaner air. Now we’re paying for it. But don’t pretend smog is ‘freedom.’”

And threaded through the shouting is the weary voice of the everyday driver, the person who doesn’t care about refinery politics or oxygenate blending—just whether they can afford to keep living here.

“I’m not leaving my kids’ school because of gasoline,” one mom posted. “But don’t tell me to ‘budget better’ when my commute is non-negotiable.”

That’s why the governor’s admission hit like it did. Because the public doesn’t need another lecture about global markets. They need someone to look them in the face and admit what’s coming: California’s gasoline system is built like a high-wire act—special fuel, limited refining, no pipeline lifeline, imports that take weeks, terminals that can bottleneck, and prices that explode the moment anything slips.

The scariest part of the scenario isn’t even the headline number everyone’s mocking. It’s the idea behind it: when California loses capacity, there isn’t a quick rescue button. There’s only a long ocean, a narrow list of suppliers, and a state that burns through fuel like oxygen.

So yes—officials are finally saying it: prices will rise in 2026.

And at the pumps, nobody is laughing anymore.

They’re just staring at the sign, doing the math in their heads, and quietly asking the question Sacramento doesn’t want to answer:

If this is what it looks like before the closures… what happens after?

Want to verify the facts in this article? Here are all the credible sources we used for our research: California Gas Prices Set to Soar in 2026 – UC Davis https://caes.ucdavis.edu/news/califor… California Gas Prices Could Skyrocket 75% as Refineries Close – Senator Brian Jones https://sr40.senate.ca.gov/content/ca… California Gas Prices Expected to Surge in 2025 – CBS 8 San Diego https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/loc… Brace for Impact California Gas Prices to Increase 2025 – California Globe https://californiaglobe.com/fl/brace-… Opinion Refinery Fire Spotlights California Gas Supply Crunch – CalMatters https://calmatters.org/commentary/202… California Petroleum Watchdog Market Update Rising Prices – California Energy Commission https://www.energy.ca.gov/news/2025-0… California’s Petroleum Watchdog Issues Consumer Advisory Following Refinery Incident – CEC https://www.energy.ca.gov/news/2025-0… Estimated Gasoline Price Breakdown and Margins – California Energy Commission https://www.energy.ca.gov/estimated-g… Californians Paying Less to Fill Up at Pump – California Energy Commission https://www.energy.ca.gov/news/2024-1… Fact Check Claims Swirling on California Gas Prices – Governor’s Office https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/06/25/fac… AAA Fuel Prices National Average Below $3 https://gasprices.aaa.com/national-av… CBS News Gas Prices Drop Below $3 Nationally https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gas-pric… CNN Gas Prices Drop But Natural Gas Rising https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/10/busine… EIA Natural Gas Outlook Winter 2025 https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/rep… NPR Thanksgiving Gas Prices Lowest in Four Years https://www.npr.org/2025/12/01/nx-s1-… USC Marshall School of Business Analysis (Michael Mische) – May 2025: Multiple outlets reported UC Davis Agricultural Economics Study – July 8, 2025: https://caes.ucdavis.edu/news/califor… U.S. Energy Information Administration – Multiple 2025 reports: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/det… OPIS (Oil Price Information Service) – November 10, 2025: https://www.opis.com/resources/energy… Kpler Shipping Data – June 2025: Referenced in multiple sources BOE Report – June 9, 2025: https://boereport.com/2025/06/09/cali… Mansfield Energy – July 1, 2025: https://mansfield.energy/2025/07/01/f… CBS Sacramento – May 9, 2025: https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/ne… KTLA – May 8, 2025: https://ktla.com/news/california/gas-…