President Donald Trump has learned something the ayatollahs have known for 47 years: Revolutionary regimes don’t fold at the negotiating table. Despite Iranian promises at the negotiating table, the Strait of Hormuz is still a chokepoint, Iran is firing at tankers, and nobody in Tehran has renounced the nuclear program.
The optimism of June has rightly faded. The smart move now is to get ahead of the Iranian agenda. And nowhere is the move more urgent than energy.
Here’s the good news: Trump’s drive for energy dominance has already bought America some room to maneuver. By ramping up production and deposing Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, the administration built a cushion its predecessors never had that kept the peak in oil prices to $120 a barrel even during Hormuz’s closure.
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Now, as hostilities resume, it’s time to build on that achievement. Here are four ways to do it.
Pump more — and ramp up refining
America is sitting on 46 billion barrels of proven oil reserves and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. That’s both an economic asset and a geopolitical weapon. Europe, still suffering from its Russian gas addiction, needs it. So do fast-growing Asian economies and energy-starved regions of Africa, Latin America, and South Asia, looking for an alternative to China.
But pumping more crude isn’t the whole story. U.S. refinery capacity has declined and needs to be increased to mix the heavy crude from Canada and Mexico with domestic light oil. Coastal refinery closures, driven by high regulatory costs and permitting uncertainty, have made the system less flexible just when flexibility matters most. Gulf Coast refineries are picking up the slack, but rising refining capacity overseas means America can’t coast on its lead.
The mismatch means America still needs to import fuel, especially for California markets. That means our energy supply chain has a hole in it.
Permits to turn energy into electrons
Wind and sun alone, and even oil and gas in the ground, don’t power anything. The real task is converting energy into the electricity that keeps factories humming, data centers running, and the next generation of American innovation possible.
That means permitting more power plants, pipelines, and transmission lines to make electricity and take it where it needs to go.
Wartime urgency is needed. Such projects now take over a decade to approve, and this needs to change. The federal Permitting Council, created in 2015, already shows the model works: It’s helped shepherd 85 projects, cutting review timelines dramatically by coordinating agencies instead of letting them work in sequence.
States such as Alaska, Idaho, Tennessee, and Utah have signed on to align their own reviews with federal timelines, a signal to developers that these states are open for business. Washington should lean harder on this tool, and Congress should update the Clean Water Act, which Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairwoman Laura Swett has said is increasingly being used to block projects rather than protect water.
Refill the reserve
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve sits at 320 million barrels — under half of its 714-million-barrel capacity. That’s a problem. It exists for the kind of crisis a wider Iran conflict triggered, not routine price swings, and it needs refilling now, while oil prices are around $70 a barrel, before the next major shock hits.
The SPR protected America (and kept global oil prices low) during the first set of Iranian hostilities, and it needs to be fully refilled. The better path isn’t price controls, export bans, or windfall taxes, all of which discourage the very production America needs. It’s using market signals and strategic releases to manage supply while keeping incentives to produce intact.
Kill the renewable fuel standard
The 20-year-old renewable fuel standard requires refiners to blend ever-larger volumes of biofuels into gasoline and diesel, with penalties if they fail to meet the targets. EPA has wide discretion to set these mandates, and its February rule for 2026-2027 is the most aggressive yet. The Energy Policy Research Foundation estimates that the RFS now tacks 45 cents onto every gallon of gasoline.
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Multiply that by 140 billion gallons of annual U.S. consumption, and American drivers are paying a hidden $66 billion tax for a program that’s outlived its purpose.
None of these four fixes requires new taxes, new mandates, or new bureaucracies. They require Washington to get out of its own way. Iran is still at war with us. America’s energy edge must get on a wartime footing.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former deputy assistant secretary for research and technology at the Transportation Department, is a distinguished fellow at the Energy Policy Research Foundation and an adjunct professor at George Washington University.