Yes, but do you have any answer to my questions?
“Cost savings were minimal, amounting to about 6.6 cents per gallon on West Coast routes.”
That is the SAVING, what would it be WITHOUT the “saving” of using JA exempt ships to carry petrol from Gulf Coast to the West Coast
Probably 6.6 cents higher. Do you have a hard time reading the article?
Basis for my questions are from the article:
Any your answer is??
Let’s add to the complexity: how would the price differential and trading pattern be different if California suspended the mandatory use of Carbob temporarily?
What if California had not forced their refiners to close and thereby shift trading patterns? After Gulf coast refiners allocated more throughput to Carbob, average voyage lengths, time to delivery and Panama canal transits have increased. The JA waiver should likely be studied in that calculus.
What the waivers have shown is that there sufficient cargo to warrant more ships. The cost of building a US ship is just so much more expensive to justify from a business perspective. Get the cost to build down and I’m sure you’d see more ships.
Math is hard.
Seattle Times published an editorial today strongly in defense of the Jones Act:
A 106-year-old maritime law requires ships hauling cargo between U.S. ports to be built, owned and crewed by Americans. The Jones Act, named for former Washington U.S. Sen. Wesley Jones, supports the country’s strategically vital merchant marine, the sum of U.S. flagged vessels and mariners operating around the world. While the law is far from perfect, in this era of immense global competition, it remains a necessity.
How to make the longtime law more effective should be debated in Congress. What’s not helpful, however, is the Trump administration’s recent waivers suspending the Jones Act, following Iran’s blockade of oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz.
Ostensibly, Trump’s move was an attempt to rein in the sky-high cost of oil, allowing American refiners to transport fuel with foreign-flagged vessels. Chris Wright, Trump’s energy secretary, told Congress recently that nearly 100 vessels have used a Jones Act waiver.
Yet gas prices remain stubbornly high, providing scant evidence the waiver has worked. That shouldn’t have come as any big surprise: academic researchers have found the Jones Act likely contributes just 1.5 cents to the cost of a gallon of gas.
Only now, with the prospect of the conflict with Iran coming to an end, are oil prices falling globally. Trump’s second 90-day waiver of the Jones Act should be removed immediately.
For American shipbuilding, the only way the waivers succeeded was in creating “a tremendous amount of uncertainty,” Crowley Maritime Corporation Vice President Clay Heil recently told Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell, during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing. The company operates tugboat fleets, including in Puget Sound.
Shipbuilders operate on decades-long timelines to procure materials, amass a skilled workforce and sustain a cadence of producing oceangoing vessels. The Jones Act has not been enough to reinvigorate the industry — but neither is suspending it with no long-term shipbuilding strategy.
“America cannot rebuild its shipyards with one hand while weakening the laws that support American-built, American-crewed, and American-flagged vessels with the other,” Cantwell’s office said in a statement.
Washington state’s maritime sector alone employs 174,000 people, with a combined $45 billion in economic activity, Cantwell’s office said.
As a single tool, the Jones Act has indeed failed to revive the country’s shipbuilding industrial base in the face of relentless competition. In 2022, China was constructing nearly 1,800 oceangoing ships, and South Korea 734, when the U.S. was producing just five. So a widening bipartisan chorus in Congress had been introducing new ideas that could galvanize the industry, including in Washington state. Trump’s own Maritime Action Planaims to invest in commercial and military shipbuilding and create “maritime prosperity zones” to reduce red tape and recapitalize shipyards.
But the president’s on-a-whim decision to suspend the Jones Act weakens those prospects — and does little to help Americans paying through the nose at the pump. For an administration spending billions of dollars to beef up border security, opening its 95,000 miles of American coastline to foreign vessels and their crews is an odd juxtaposition.
“Instead of less war and lower prices, Americans are now getting more war, higher prices and fewer jobs in the American maritime industry,” U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Everett, said in a letter to Trump expressing his own frustrations over the waivers.
The Jones Act’s original intent, as now, is national security — that America must possess the ability to transport troops, supplies and goods over the world’s vast oceans. The Trump administration and Congress should work in tandem to make strategic changes to the Jones Act that best safeguard the country and strengthen its shipbuilding sector. But another capricious move by Trump has flooded a struggling industry with uncertainty. The waivers should come to an end as soon as possible.
https://www.cato.org/jones-act-waiver-tracker#key-findings
Cato has this interactive tracker of the JA waiver voyages.
In the case of Puerto Rico, the waiver has seemingly made little difference in the cost of propane, aside from lessening the expected increase in price due to conflict.
The backers of Cato like the Kochs have a vested interest in the abolition of the Jones Act. Does the Jones Act need modifying? Sure but the abolition or continued waivers are a major mistake for many reasons.
Not an endorsement of Cato… They just have a website you can see the waiver voyages. I can even see a petcoke from TX to JAX I did on a U.S. flag bulker years ago.
I know of an ATB that lost a one year contract because of the waiver (the contract had been negotiated, but not yet signed). The charterer is using a foreign flag tanker instead.
I know that some crew have been shuffled around to other boats.
California’s oil supply problems and higher costs are entirely self inflicted. The Jones Act waiver does change that.
Those are good numbers but in the grand scheme of things, the fishing, tug, government and ferry sectors of WA would not affected by a Jones Act waiver. Maybe tanker shipping but with $6 gas in Seattle, the more the merrier in my opinion. I am no fan of a Jones Act waiver.
Foreign flag tankers displace American tugs and oil barges.
If the oil traders had their way, they would only use the cheapest foreign flag vessels.
While the waivers continue, US flagged tankers continue to be employed. Based on current information no US tankers have been displaced by waivered vessels. That being said, there is cargo that needs to be hauled and the fleet is far to small. It’s time to think outside of the box and pave the way for a modernized Jones Act. One that will usher in an era of investment, a growing fleet, and job creation. Enter the Maritime Infrastructure Resilience Act (MIRA), a proposal to change the face of the US maritime industry. I sat down with Maritime Action and discussed what the MIRA is and how it could pave the way to regaining some maritime sovereignty.
Proposed New Bill That Could Reshape the Jones Act: Maritime Infrastructure Resilience Act (MIRA)
