President Trump’s decision to slap a 10 percent tariff on oil and gas imports from Canada is shining an uncomfortable spotlight on a little-known fact about New Hampshire households:
Tens of thousands of them rely on Canadian oil to keep warm.
While the idea of a tank full of heating oil firing up the furnace may seem quaint in some parts of the country, it’s how nearly five million U.S. households heated their home in 2023, according to the United States Energy Information Administration. About 80 percent of them are in the northeast.
In New Hampshire, more than 40 percent of residents use home heating oil, and in Maine, it’s more than half.
Much of that oil comes, not from Texas or Oklahoma, but from Canada. As a result, the National Energy Assistance Directors Association predicts the cost of oil-based heating would increase by $117 to $1,576 on average if Trump’s tariffs take effect.
America imports Canadian oil because of its proximity and the network of established pipelines that serve both nations. But it also uses Canadian oil because it’s the sort of heavy crude similar to the oil from California that many U.S. refineries are designed to process.
Around 25 percent of all oil refined in America comes from Canada.
Critics of the Trump tariffs are complaining about the price tag, but energy policy experts are asking a bigger question: Why are so many Granite Staters still burning oil — Canadian or American — when the U.S. is the largest producer of cleaner natural gas?
And why is the Granite State relying on electricity from Canada when it could be generating electricity for the New England grid using natural gas — which already produces about 25 percent of the state’s power?
Because of a successful effort by the Biden administration and its green allies to block energy infrastructure to bring U.S. natural gas to New England.
The results are now on display.
“We take nearly 100 percent of our gas from Canada,” Neale Lunderville with Vermont Gas Systems told the Boston Globe. “That’s the bottom line.”
“Other pipelines bring natural gas from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Quebec to Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts,” the Globe added. “For those who rely on natural gas to heat their homes, the tariffs could pack a punch.”
And for New Hampshire heating oil customers, the punch could hit even harder. But it doesn’t have to.
Asked why so many Granite Staters are burning Canadian oil as opposed to lower-carbon natural gas, Rep. Michael Harrington (R-Strafford), a former member of the state’s Public Utility Commission, had a simple answer.
“No pipeline space. President Trump has said he wants the previously canceled Constitution natural gas pipeline to be built. This would help big time.”
And, Harrington said, you don’t need tariffs on Canada to drive up prices for energy in New England. The anti-infrastructure policies of the Biden administration and his allies have done that.
“Because of the lack of infrastructure, when it’s really cold, New England is paying more than three times the Henry Hub price for natural gas.”
(“Henry Hub” is a natural gas pipeline located in Louisiana that serves as the benchmark for futures contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange.)
Pennsylvania is the second-largest natural gas production state (behind Texas) and there have been many pipeline proposals to bring natural gas from the prolific Marcellus and Utica shale regions to New England, said Marc Brown with Consumer Energy Alliance. But those proposals ran into heavy resistance, particularly in blue states like Massachusetts and New York.
“Any one of those projects would have reduced energy prices, increased the electricity grid’s reliability, and reduced emissions.”
Supporters of expanded U.S. natural gas note the irony of environmental activists and Democratic governors going to court to keep more New Englanders burning imported oil.
New York banned fracking in 2014 after a six-year moratorium sparked by unverified environmental concerns, despite a 2009 ConEdison report praising the state’s “safe, robust natural gas infrastructure,” including ten pipelines.
In Massachusetts, Gov. Maura Healey (D) recently demanded energy companies lower their prices after the state’s public utilities commission approved a 25 percent price increase on natural gas. But the progressive Democrat has previously bragged about how she “stopped two pipelines from coming into this state.”
Access to natural gas in the Bay State has become so problematic that in 2018 and 2019, some Massachusetts utilities issued moratoriums on new residential natural gas hookups due to “insufficient pipeline capacity.” Energy companies shifted focus to truck transportation of oil and natural gas, extending delivery time of shipments – and driving up costs.
But that could change under the Trump administration, Brown said.
“Hopefully, projects receive approvals so that they can deliver much-needed relief to families and businesses–especially to those on low- and fixed incomes that can least afford the exorbitantly high energy prices we see in the Northeast.”
Until it does, Granite Staters will keep burning heating oil from Canada and using electricity from Quebec. And that’s not the result of Trump tariffs, but rather blue-state pipeline bans.
