Trump says the world should buy his oil. The US barely has enough for itself

Benedict SmithSat, May 23, 2026 at 9:30 AM UTC

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Donald Trump oil fields

Bombs, drones or missiles won’t win the war between the US and Iran. It comes down to oil – and both countries think they have an ace up their sleeve.

Washington’s strategy is to grind down Tehran with a naval blockade to choke off its oil revenues, inflicting substantial losses on the regime as it runs out of storage capacity.

But no matter what Donald Trump is planning, Iran can, and has been, inflicting severe disruption on the US and the rest of the world with its chokehold over the Strait of Hormuz, the crucial oil passage.

And while Mr Trump has been able to limit the economic pain so far, he is running out of time.

The US president, who always has an eye for a deal, believes he has a solution to the energy crisis unleashed when he bombed Iran on Feb 28.

“To those countries that can’t get fuel, many of which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, we had to do it ourselves. I have a suggestion,” he said in a primetime address on April 1.

“Number one, buy oil from the United States of America. We have plenty. We have so much.”

Iran has been inflicting serious pain on the US and the rest of the world with its chokehold over the Strait of Hormuz - Jacquelyn Martin

The US now produces more oil than Russia and Saudi Arabia put together, and more natural gas than Russia, China and Iran combined. No country in history has exported as much energy as it does.

But it still isn’t enough.

Mr Trump spent the last presidential election promising to “drill, baby, drill” and unleash American energy dominance.

Still, the number of barrels of crude oil processed by refineries is up only marginally from before the outbreak of war: from 15.8 million barrels a day to 16.3 million barrels a day, according to government statistics.

And there’s little prospect of that increasing. Refineries are running at “full throttle”, according to analysis by Kpler, the data company.

Mr Trump has engineered an export boom by opening the floodgates of the US’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SSR), the world’s largest supply of emergency crude oil, which is stored in salt caverns along the Gulf of Mexico.

Chris Wright, the US energy secretary, optimistically predicted on May 15 that the administration would “leave it fuller than when we started”.

But US crude inventories – which include the reserve and commercial stocks – fell last week by 17.8 million barrels. It was the steepest decline since records began in 1982.

Bloomberg calculates that the SSR would, at the current rate, run dry by early September. In reality, market panic will set in well before then.

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The export surge also creates more issues on the home front, as domestic prices are tied more closely to the world markets.

Overseas buyers have turned to the US for oil, gasoline, jet fuel and other products that have been cut off from the Middle East.

The chief executive of Corpus Christi, one of the biggest ports along the US’s Gulf Coast, says he sees “a constant parade of tankers coming in and out”.

A US energy department report in 2024 found that unlimited exports of natural gas would raise wholesale US prices by 30 per cent and increase costs for American households by more than $100 (£74) a year by 2050.

Representative Ro Khanna, a populist Democrat, introduced a bill in April to ban petroleum exports if prices at the pump equal or increase beyond $3.12 (£2.32) per gallon for seven days, to cut costs for struggling Americans.

The move would “lower gas prices” and put “America first”, he declared, stealing one of the president’s favourite slogans.

As Mr Wright noted in a CNBC interview on Friday, this isn’t a move Mr Trump would contemplate.

“This is a top Trump agenda: we’re going to be a growing energy exporter to the world,” he said. “We can’t be a major energy exporter to the world if we decide sometimes to stop exporting our energy.”

However, the president, like his predecessors, will be all too aware that a “jump at the pumps” kills presidents at the polls.

As Ron Klain, the former chief of staff for Joe Biden, once ironically noted: “Gas is the only product in America where they post the price on a sign that you pass twenty times a day.”

A tank of diesel costing $100 on May 15 - Julio Cortez

Mr Trump has waived the Jones act, the law requiring American-built ships to transport goods between domestic ports, which the White House claims has unlocked more than nine million barrels of oil.

And he has called for a suspension of the federal gas tax, which appears to have support in congress from both parties.

Still, these are temporary measures – particularly when there’s no guarantee a tax cut would be passed on to consumers.

Brent crude is hovering around the $100 mark, down from the sharp spike to $126 (£94) on April 30, still up about 42 per cent from the start of the war.

While Mr Trump escalates tensions with Iran, his emergency stockpile won’t last long, and there are only so many levers he can pull to cut domestic prices before the Midterms.

He needs to find his way out of the Iran quagmire soon. But there’s a lack of obvious exit strategies, and an opponent who knows he’s running out of time.

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Source: “AOL Money”