Raw material costs fading as a reshoring factor? The citation counts beside steel and diesel prices

Exhibit 3.1 is titled “Top Factors Driving Reshoring and FDI: 2024, 2025, 2026*” and lists 29 factors with the number of citations each received. Its source note on page 14 reads:

Source: RI Master Data through 1H 2026, with 2026 annualized.

The 2026 column is therefore a first-half count scaled to a full year, not twelve months of announcements.

Raw Materials Cost: 59 in 2024, 24 in 2025 and 17 in 2026 annualized. That is -59.3% from 2024 to 2025 and -29.2% from 2025 to the 2026 annualized figure. It ranks 20th of the 29 factors by 2025 citations, tied with Quality/Rework/Warranty.

Freight Cost: 8 in 2024, 6 in 2025 and 6 in 2026 annualized, ranked 26th. These are single digits. A change of two citations is a quarter of the 2024 count, so the freight row supports very little on its own.

As a share of the listed factors (our arithmetic on the exhibit's columns), Raw Materials Cost was 1.87% of the 3,151 citations in 2024, 0.56% of 4,259 in 2025 and 0.47% of 3,611 in 2026 annualized. The total rose in 2025 while this row fell.

The report does not say raw material costs are fading. It prints the row and does not comment on it. The phrase “raw materials” appears once in its text, on page 14, about capacity and not about cost:

Reshoring and FDI continue to fill supply chain gaps, expanding domestic capacity in raw materials, components, logistics, distribution, and advanced manufacturing technologies.

Freight cost is not discussed in the text at all. The “fading factor” reading is an inference from the counts, and the report itself cautions against reading the counts too literally (page 16):

These results indicate that public announcements do not always reveal the strategic considerations that shape manufacturing investment decisions.

Its one statement on shipping is also on page 16, and gives no price:

The U.S.-Iran conflict is disrupting shipping routes and adding uncertainty to global supply chains.

For what the shipping disruption did to Brent, bunker fuel and diesel prices, see what the US-Iran shipping disruption cost in fuel.

For steel we use the Producer Price Index for steel mill products, BLS series WPU1017 (1982 = 100, not seasonally adjusted). It is an index of prices received by US mills across their product range. It is not a dollars-per-ton quote and not a hot rolled coil price.

The index averaged 291.4 in 2024 and 298.4 in 2025, a change of +2.4%. Its January to June 2026 average was 337.2, +13.0% against the 2025 average.

It was 399.645 in October 2026, 32.9% above October 2025 (300.665). That is the highest since July 2022 (404.112) and still below the December 2021 high of 449.711. The July to October 2026 values are preliminary and BLS may revise them.

The US average retail price of No. 2 diesel was $6.127 a gallon for the week of Nov 9, 2026 (EIA, including taxes). It was $3.837 for the week of Nov 10, 2025, so the price is $2.290 higher than a year earlier ($6.127 − $3.837).

The 2026 low was $3.459 for the week of Jan 12, 2026. The high was $6.529 for the week of Sep 21, 2026, the highest weekly value in the EIA series, which starts on Mar 21, 1994. The highest before 2026 was $5.810 for the week of Jun 20, 2022.

By period, the weekly prices averaged $3.760 in 2024 and $3.660 in 2025 (-2.6%), then $4.735 in the first half of 2026 (+29.4% against the 2025 average).

This is a pump price. A fleet or a plant buying under contract pays something else. We keep this half short because two other posts cover it: why diesel is so expensive and US diesel stocks below 100 million barrels. Current values are on the live diesel price page and diesel prices by region. For goods that move by sea, see bunker fuel prices.

The report's 2026 column covers the first half of the year, so the price columns for 2026 are January to June averages. Citations are counts from the exhibit. Prices are period averages of the series above.

It shows that the two do not move together. The count fell most between 2024 and 2025, when the steel index and the diesel average barely moved. It fell again in the first half of 2026, when both prices rose.

It does not show that raw materials got cheaper, and it does not show that they stopped mattering. The data cannot say why companies cite the cost less. A citation is a company naming raw material cost as a reason for its project. The count can fall because the cost no longer favors a US location, or because announcements lead with other reasons; tariff citations went from 11 to 146 in the same exhibit. Neither reading is tested here, and the exhibit cannot separate them.

Three limits on the comparison. The citation counts are small. The 2026 column is half a year scaled up. And both price series are US prices, while a sourcing decision turns on the difference between US and foreign cost, which neither series measures.

For how producer and consumer fuel prices relate in the same BLS data, see PPI vs CPI for energy.

OilPriceAPI does not serve a steel price of any kind. Our /v1/commodities catalogue listed 1,037 codes on Nov 14, 2026 and none is a steel product. Two are steelmaking inputs, IRON_ORE_USD and COKING_COAL_USD, and neither is a steel price. We do not publish a hot rolled coil price. The BLS index for hot rolled sheet and strip (WPU101703) returns no values after February 2022 from the BLS API, which is why this page uses the broader steel mill products index.

We do serve the diesel half. DIESEL_RETAIL_USD is the same EIA weekly figure: on Nov 14, 2026 it returned 6.127 with source date Nov 9, 2026.

import requests

r = requests.get(
    "https://api.oilpriceapi.com/v1/prices/latest",
    params={"by_code": "DIESEL_RETAIL_USD"},
    headers={"Authorization": "Token YOUR_API_KEY"},
    timeout=10,
)
r.raise_for_status()
d = r.json()["data"]
# EIA weekly US on-highway diesel, dollars per gallon including taxes.
print(d["price"], d["unit"], "EIA week of", d["source_date"])

Get an API key for diesel and bunker fuel prices, or read the API documentation.