MAINE, USA — As gas and diesel prices climb during the war in Iran, some of Maine’s most recognizable industries are feeling the strain.
From the coast to the woods, people who rely on fuel to do their jobs say the higher costs are changing how they work and raising concerns about what comes next. Lobstermen are rethinking trips on the water, while logging contractors say the math is getting harder for truckers and mills across the state.
For Maine fishermen, fueling a boat is no longer routine. It is a calculation.
One fisherman said his boat holds about 120 gallons of fuel, enough to last only a few days. With diesel prices hovering around $5 to $6 a gallon, those costs add up quickly for crews already working in a demanding industry.
“I can burn 40-50 gallons a day of fuel, and at 5-6 dollars a gallon, that’s a lot of lobsters you have to catch to pay for that, let alone make a profit,” Sonny Beal of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association said.
Beal said the impact stretches beyond the boats themselves and into nearly every part of the process of catching, selling, and distributing seafood in Maine.
“It affects our trucks driving the lobsters to the plants to wherever they might go, it affects the trucks bringing in our trap wire, our buoys.”
Beal says some crews are responding by cutting back on trips and doing more work in a single day. But that comes with tradeoffs.
“You know, rather than doing things over the course of two days, let’s try and get in a 14- or 16-hour day and get all the gear hauled,” fisherman Jason Joyce, who serves as the director of advocacy for the New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association, said. “The downside to that is everybody’s working, they’re fatigued, and accidents could happen.”
Both fishermen said these increased costs are likely to affect how much they’ll have to charge for their catch, which will be passed on to consumers.
“It jacks the price up on everything,” Beal said, “The trickled down effect they call it.”
The same financial pressure is being felt in Maine’s logging industry, where diesel powers nearly every part of the job.
“I mean, there is no equipment that does not use diesel as its primary fuel for both harvesting and trucking,” Dana Doran, executive director of the Professional Logging Contractors of the Northeast, said.
Doran said spiking diesel prices are adding roughly 20 percent to the cost of each trip a driver makes to and from a mill. That increase, he said, creates uncertainty for contractors and for mills that depend on a steady supply of wood.
He also warned that an estimated 30 percent of Maine’s logging truckers could stop driving if hauling wood is no longer profitable.
That would not just affect the logging industry. Doran said consumers could eventually see those added costs passed along in the price of lumber and building materials.
“If you walk into Home Depot or Lowe’s or Hammond Lumber, and you want to buy a 2x4 or a sheet of plywood, that’s going to cost you more,” he said.