The last time Brent crude held above $107 a barrel for more than a week, American drivers watched the national gasoline average blow past $5 a gallon in roughly three weeks. That was May 2022. Now the benchmark is back above that threshold, and the catalyst is uncomfortably familiar: a confrontation with Iran that threatens tanker traffic through the world’s most important oil chokepoint.
President Trump told reporters in late May 2026 that he was “losing patience” with Tehran, as reported by Reuters. Traders responded immediately, bidding Brent past $107 and pricing in the possibility of a prolonged disruption through the Strait of Hormuz. The national average for regular gasoline already sat near $3.80, according to AAA. If the 2022 pattern holds, that number could climb past $5 before the Fourth of July, adding hundreds of dollars to a typical household’s summer fuel bill.
The parallel is not exact. But the structural similarities are close enough to unsettle energy economists, refinery operators, and anyone planning a road trip.
What happened in 2022, week by week
Federal data lays out the sequence clearly. The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s weekly Brent spot series shows crude averaging between roughly $107 and $112 per barrel across several weeks in May 2022, driven by sanctions on Russian oil after the invasion of Ukraine. By the week of June 13, the EIA’s national retail gasoline tracker recorded the average for regular fuel at $5.01 a gallon. Prices began easing in the second half of that year as demand softened and the Biden administration authorized a historic drawdown from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
The lag between the crude spike and the pump spike was roughly three weeks, though the EIA cautions that the pass-through is never mechanical. Refinery utilization rates, planned maintenance outages, regional inventory levels, and seasonal fuel-blend requirements all shape how fast higher crude costs reach consumers. Drivers in California, where state taxes and tighter fuel specifications add to the bill, tend to feel the hit sooner and harder than motorists along the Gulf Coast, where refineries sit closer to crude supply.
Why the market structure looks familiar
The current spike shares a technical fingerprint with the 2022 episode. An EIA analysis published in April 2026 found that Brent spot prices had moved above corresponding futures contracts, a market structure called backwardation. When spot crude commands a premium over future delivery, it typically signals that physical barrels are tight right now, not that speculators are simply betting on trouble months away. In 2022, the same pattern preceded refiners bidding aggressively for every available cargo, and those higher input costs showed up at the pump within weeks.
The geopolitical trigger carries its own echoes. Roughly 20 percent of the world’s traded oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz every day, according to EIA estimates. At a summit in late May 2026, Chinese President Xi Jinping offered to help negotiate an end to the Iran standoff and reopen the strait to normal tanker traffic, according to the Associated Press. In a late May 2026 Fox News interview, host Sean Hannity pressed Trump on the Hormuz bottleneck as a direct factor in global supply. Trump acknowledged that the waterway’s status was central to his calculations on Iran.
Those exchanges confirm that both Washington and Beijing treat the strait as a live variable in energy pricing, not a background risk that can be safely ignored.
What could keep this time from repeating 2022
Several forces could blunt or delay the impact.
OPEC+ spare capacity. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates hold meaningful spare production capacity and could ramp output to offset lost Iranian barrels. In 2022, the cartel was slower to respond, partly because post-pandemic production discipline was still the consensus. The political calculus may differ now, particularly if Riyadh sees an opportunity to reclaim market share.
U.S. production at record levels. Domestic crude output has been running above 13 million barrels per day, near all-time highs, according to EIA production data. That volume did not exist at this scale a decade ago and provides a partial buffer against foreign supply shocks.
Refinery readiness. U.S. refineries entered the 2026 summer driving season with utilization rates that, while high, have not yet hit the ceiling that constrained throughput in 2022. More refining capacity online means crude can be converted to gasoline faster.
Diplomacy. A breakthrough with Iran, however unlikely it appears today, could deflate the risk premium almost overnight. Oil markets price in fear quickly, but they also unwind it quickly when the threat recedes.
Working against all of that: the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve remains well below its pre-2022 level. The Biden-era drawdown pulled the reserve from roughly 600 million barrels to under 400 million, and refilling has been slow. Washington has less room to flood the market with emergency barrels if prices spike further.
There is also the demand picture to consider. Gasoline consumption in the U.S. has been relatively flat in recent years, and electric vehicle sales have grown, but EVs still represent a small share of the total fleet. The vast majority of American drivers remain fully exposed to pump prices, and summer driving season pushes demand to its annual peak.
The signals worth tracking over the next three weeks
For anyone budgeting for summer travel or commuting costs, the most useful indicators are straightforward:
- Weekly Brent spot prices on the EIA website. If the benchmark stays above $107 for two or more consecutive weekly prints, the 2022 pattern gains credibility.
- The spot-futures spread. Persistent backwardation means physical supply is genuinely tight, not just headline-driven.
- AAA’s daily national gasoline average. A move above $4.25 would put the market on a trajectory consistent with the 2022 run toward $5.
- Strait of Hormuz tanker traffic data, tracked by firms like Kpler and Vortexa. Any measurable drop in daily transits would confirm that the supply risk is more than rhetoric.
No single indicator guarantees $5 gasoline by the Fourth of July. But if several flash at once, the odds tilt sharply in that direction. The 2022 episode is a cautionary template, not a guaranteed script. The difference between a scare and a sustained crisis will come down to whether Brent stays elevated long enough for the cost to cascade through every link in the supply chain, from tanker hold to refinery cracker to terminal rack to the pump where you swipe your card.
