Errr... whoops. I guess I need to top off my car again. 3 million barrels is 126 million gallons. The USA only consumes 360-380 million gallons of gasoline a day. Now, if they mean 3 million barrels of oil refining, then we drop the loss to something like 36 million gallons of gasoline, but that's still easily 10% of national gasoline production right there.

I guess this time I'll just top off my tank tonight but leave my two 5-gallon cans empty, with just my 6 gallon in reserve. I can't picture Texas getting knocked out of production for months the way some of the LA refineries are right now. We'll see though.

As for $5/gallon, there are SO MANY anti-gouging laws getting kicked around city, state and federal lawmaking assmeblies of all sorts that I don't picture any unreasonable pricing like what we saw with $6/gallon gas in Georgia last time. Unfortunately, any spike we do see will be real and thus impossible to legislate down. We need further work on the shale to oil and coal to oil technologies as well as more refineries.