Diesel prices continue to soar with record prices, including

The U.S. average diesel price hit $6.4866 a gallon Friday into Saturday — an all-time high, according to AAA. Texas’s average diesel price set its own record the same day at $5.9797 a gallon, the second time this week Texas has broken its all-time high; it first broke the record Wednesday at $5.9604. Regular gasoline is up too — nationally $4.4759, in Texas $3.9516 — but both remain well below their 2022 records ($5.0165 nationally, $4.6949 in Texas). This remains, specifically, a diesel story.

What that means at the pump

Kerr County runs on pickup trucks, so it’s worth translating those records into what one actually costs to fill. A Ford F-150 with its 26-gallon tank — cost about $103 to fill at Texas’s current regular average, up from about $72 a year ago: roughly $31 more for the same truck, same tank, same driver. A heavy-duty diesel truck — an F-250 Super Duty with its 34-gallon tank — cost about $203 to fill at today’s Texas diesel average, up from about $109 a year ago. That’s $94 more per tank than the same truck cost to fill in September 2025, and about $29 of that increase has landed in just the past month.

What it looks like at Kerrville stations

As of Saturday morning, 18 Kerrville-area stations reported regular gas prices to GasBuddy, ranging from $3.89 (Exxon/Shell, 857 N. Sidney Baker St.) to $4.01 (Shell, 2128 Sidney Baker St.) — only one of the 18 above $4, and the rest clustered tightly around $3.95 to $3.99.

Diesel told a much less competitive story. Of 12 Kerrville-area stations reporting a diesel price, the low was $5.93 (H-E-B, 300 Main St.) and the high was $5.99 — a six-cent spread across the entire county. Two days earlier, the cheapest diesel GasBuddy could find countywide was $5.96 with prices bunched within 3 cents of each other; now even that narrow band has compressed further. Whatever room there ever was to shop around for a better diesel price is essentially gone.

Why: a genuine supply shock, not a mystery

GasBuddy’s head of petroleum analysis, Patrick De Haan, put it plainly in the company’s most recent national price analysis: average gasoline and diesel prices rose in every state over the past week “as geopolitical tensions escalated on multiple fronts, with friction between the U.S. and Iran, new hostilities in the Red Sea, and the shutdown of Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline all combining to jolt prices sharply higher.” New attacks over the weekend knocked two additional Russian refineries offline, De Haan said, which is likely to push diesel prices higher still even as most of the country shifts to cheaper winter-blend gasoline. “The scale of ongoing geopolitical escalations makes meaningful price relief unlikely in the near term,” he said. “Motorists should brace for continued volatility ahead.”

The mechanics behind that: crude oil itself jumped after two supply “safety valves” closed within a day of each other. Oman announced that planned Gulf Cooperation Council-Iran talks over shipping through the Strait of Hormuz had been postponed, eliminating the most anticipated path to de-escalation. Separately, Saudi Arabia kept its East-West crude pipeline shut following drone strikes — that pipeline is the kingdom’s main bypass around the Strait, with capacity of about 7 million barrels a day. WTI crude jumped to $103.23 a barrel and Brent to $108.29, both four-month highs, closing in on the $114 peak hit in March.