Not my downvote, but,

When I was boarding tankers regularly, if you get hungry they are very generous with the food and I liked the US vessels especially well not just because they had a wider variety of familiar items 24/7.

When you think about it the big marine fuel terminals are scattered but concentrated in two different kinds of places.

The producers, and on the other hand the consumers.

>This is especially challenging for residents in Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, places where imported goods are more expensive because of Jones Act expenses.

The islands like Hawaii and Puerto Rico are consumers and have no option other than ships. Their docks are primarily "import" terminals even when the cargo originates in the US mainland.

And all goods are not gasoline.

On consuming islands every non-native consumer item has always been expensive because it's all "imported" by ship from somewhere. The Bahamas may not be US islands but imported things are high-priced like Hawaii since the Bahamas dollar is exactly tied to the US dollar by design. The Bahamas is not bound by the Jones Act but they always have higher gasoline prices than Hawaii, so there is that. There's no physical reason that shipping fuel from New Jersey to Palm Beach could not be accomplished with the exact same expenditure of labor & equipment compared to shipping from New Jersey to Freeport GBI. Interestingly, when the Bahamian refinery was operating on Freeport (using imported oil of course) they did not even make gasoline then, only other fuels.

Alaska is not quite like the others since it ships out so much crude oil but that is not gasoline. It is not an island either but it is also discontinuous with the US, and still about as remote as the US islands. The vast crude oil resource makes this location a net marine exporter though. But retail gasoline ends up about the same price as Hawaii.

There is a baseline cost to marine shipping and beyond that freight charges are a matter of distance & location.

Florida Man here to remind you the southernmost state's not too nearby either, and the further you go toward Miami, the greater the consumerism.

What would happen is that a constant movement of US-flag fuel tankers from New Jersey refineries would transport the fuel to the Florida ports of Jacksonville, Canaveral, Palm Beach, Everglades, Miami, and sometimes as far as Tampa, and that's not very close to New Jersey. The same major refining companies also supplied fuel shipped from Texas or Louisiana, sometimes to as far as Jacksonville. It still works quite a bit like this.

At the time, there were more Florida power plants burning fuel oil than there are now, and they were the same traditional kind of power plant that there were a lot of in Texas. However the retail price of electricity per KWH was literally twice as much in Texas as it was in Florida. And when you do the math, the power companies in Texas were able to obtain similar long-term bulk supply fuel pricing compared to Florida, but there was no marine shipping cost on top of that for the Texas electricity producers. Regardless, electric companies were making money in either place.

This was before utility deregulation had made as many inroads, and I can only attribute it to a Florida government attitude that had still retained its traditional consumer-protection approach more so than Texas. With 20-20 hindsight both have gradually reversed by now into more of a predatory government approach rather than protective role.

There's also the jet fuel which is B2B too, but the gasoline & motor diesel parcels are the shipboard liters that are intended for "eventual" retail sale, and of course that's ASAP after unloading the vessel.

As we know the retail price of gasoline in Florida has never differed very much from that in Texas. Since fuel can also be brought to Florida by rail or truck, that may have something to do with it, but they sure use lots of US-flag ships and ocean-going barges too so you would have to figure they have all been making money the whole time.

Among things that have swayed the price of gasoline even now, the Jones Act does not seem to have been one of them.

Looks like there's got to be somebody somewhere who would prosper greatly by repeal of the Jones Act, but it's probably not the vast majority of retail gasoline consumers served by US-flag fuel tankers now.