The Household Barrel

On the last Thursday of February 2026, a gallon of regular gasoline cost $2.98 and Brent crude closed at $72.48. Within a week the strikes had begun and the Strait of Hormuz had been declared closed. By October, diesel had set an all-time record, mortgage rates had climbed past 7 percent, and Brent was back above $110.

The Household Barrel follows the 2026 oil and energy shock from a disputed waterway to the places where ordinary families actually meet it: the pump, the grocery checkout, the heating bill, the parcel on the porch, the airfare, the car loan and the paycheck. Its central finding is that the war reached households unevenly and mostly by indirect routes. The pump was the loud channel. The bigger and slower costs ran through diesel, freight, heating oil, jet fuel and interest rates, while wages failed to keep up.

The book also gives the channels that ran the other way their due: grocery inflation that eased through late summer, and American natural gas that stayed cheap while European and Asian prices soared. Across sixteen chapters it explains what is inside a gallon, why a war prices a barrel, how earlier oil shocks compare, and what a household in Ohio and one in rural Maine would each have paid.

Written in plain language for readers who want to understand their own bills, with sources listed at the back.