Central Atlantic (PADD 1B) diesel price

Most of the refining capacity still operating on the East Coast sits in this subregion, PADD 1B, which runs from New York and New Jersey down through Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland to Washington, D.C. It is also home to the Port of New York and New Jersey, the harbor behind this site's own New York Harbor spot quote, and that combination of local refining and the region's main import gateway usually keeps Central Atlantic priced in the middle of the East Coast range: above the Gulf Coast, but less exposed than New England, which has neither.

A turnaround or unplanned outage at one of the region's refineries, or a swing in New York Harbor import volumes, is what typically moves this number.

New York Harbor is what makes this sub-district different from the two around it. It is the delivery point for the ULSD futures contract, so the harbor is not only a place fuel arrives, it is where the price of US distillate is settled. A Central Atlantic terminal is therefore pricing off the same quote the rest of the market marks its contracts against, which tends to keep this number closer to the national figure than a pure freight calculation would put it. What are PADDs has the district map behind that split.

The refineries still running in the corridor, in Delaware, eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey, are what separate 1B from 1A. They give the sub-district a domestic supply floor that New England has no version of, and they are also the concentration risk: with so few plants left, one extended turnaround removes a meaningful share of local production and the harbor has to import the difference. Watch scheduled maintenance seasons in spring and fall for that.

Demand here is a mix nothing else on the map matches: interstate trucking on the I-95 corridor, the short-haul container work in and out of the New York and New Jersey terminals, construction across the densest metro area in the country, and a heating-oil load through Pennsylvania and upstate New York. Those loads peak at different times of year, which smooths the seasonal shape of the price relative to New England's.

The Central Atlantic vs. the US average page shows how that gap has moved.