What if a refinery turnaround wave triggers a US diesel shortage?
A clustered Gulf Coast turnaround wave collapses distillate stocks and sends diesel cracks (heating-oil/ULSD) vertical while crude lags; the precise trade is long diesel cracks, not flat Brent which the map over-weights. Rhymes with the autumn-2022 US distillate-inventory scare, when ULSD cracks blew out to records on sub-25-day cover even as crude was range-bound. Forward angle: with US refining capacity structurally lower post-2020 closures, a 2026 turnaround stack tightens diesel faster than pre-pandemic; play the crack, fade the flat-price chase.
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The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 0–6 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. A simultaneous Gulf Coast refinery turnaround wave collapses distillate stocks, sending diesel cracks vertical. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Diesel ▲ · Oil supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.