Texas Declares 'Statewide Disaster' Over Diesel Prices, Allows Truckers To Fill Up With Home Heating Oil

Diesel prices are bad right now — record-setting bad, industry-altering bad — and when prices get bad, people start to look for alternatives. For diesel, that alternative usually comes in the form of home heating oil, which is cheaper to buy but illegal to run in a motor vehicle — unless, that is, you live in Texas. Governor Greg Abbott, not a man usually known for his smart decision-making, on Monday declared diesel prices to be a "statewide disaster" that necessitated legalizing the use of home heating oil in vehicles. 

Home heating oil and diesel fuel are, functionally, identical. Diesel usually gets some internal combustion-focused additives that home heating oil doesn't, engine-cleaning detergents and such, but both will burn in the other's use case. The biggest difference with home heating oil, really, is the red dye that it carries — a red dye that indicates it hasn't been taxed as an on-road fuel, which is what really makes it cheaper. 

While Abbott's proclamation here could theoretically make fuel cheaper for truckers, it's not really his move to make. Diesel is regulated not at the state level, but by the federal Clean Air Act — an act that Abbott asked EPA administrator Lee Zeldin for a waiver from in a separate letter. Abbot specifically asked Zeldin for clearance on sulfur content in roadgoing diesel, which the EPA caps at 15 parts per million (a number that many colder states also limit home heating oil to). In Texas, home heating oil can reach 4,000 parts per million of sulfur. 

Even if Abbott gets his exemption from Zeldin, though, there's still the IRS's control over taxation to be considered. Home heating oil is dyed red to show that it hasn't been taxed as a roadgoing fuel, and while the Trump administration has considered waiving diesel taxes, the White House and IRS have yet to take any actual action on the topic. Such tax relief has happened before, in the Covid era, but not since, and might not help bring down prices anyway.

Currently, it seems that Abbott's proclamation doesn't actually amount to much — state authorities may not be enforcing laws around filling your truck up with "dyed diesel," but the EPA and IRS laws around it remain in place. Perhaps Texas' queries to the federal government will see some relief, but that hasn't yet happened. For now, Abbott doesn't seem to have a comprehensive plan to address the "statewide disaster" he declared.