By Michael G. Malloy, Staff Reporter This story appears in the Nov. 24 print edition of Transport Topics.
The U.S. retail diesel average resumed its downward trend last week, slipping 1.6 cents to $3.661 a gallon, the Department of Energy reported.
Last week’s decline followed a one-week increase of 5.4 cents. Prior to that jump, the average price for commercial trucking’s main fuel had not increased for four months, falling 30 cents to $3.623 in early November, the lowest level since February 2011.
The increase two weeks ago was sparked by a 16-cent jump in DOE’s Midwest region. However, the average in that 15-state region ticked down 0.2 cent last week to $3.786, which was the highest price among DOE’s five regions.
“A very robust harvest season pushed [prices higher] in the heartland, but those increases will not persist,” said Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis with the Oil Price Information Service. “It would take a repeat of polar vortex conditions in January and February to prompt utilities to burn diesel” instead of natural gas and push prices higher.
While Midwest wholesale diesel prices remain about 30 to 40 cents per gallon above those on the East and West coasts, Kloza, who was visiting fuel facilities in California last week, said lower levels on both coasts “are more indicative of what fleets will see in the next few months.”
The retail regular gasoline average, meanwhile, continued to spiral downward, falling 4.7 cents to $2.894 per gallon. That marked the seventh straight decline and the 17th in 20 weeks, leaving it at the lowest level in four years, DOE reported after its Nov. 17 survey of fueling stations.
The fuel, which has plunged 82 cents since April, is at its lowest level since it was $2.856 on Nov. 29, 2010.
Oil prices, meanwhile, re-mained near a four-year low last week, hovering just below $75 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, Bloomberg News reported.
Crude’s $74.21 per-barrel Nymex finish Nov. 13 was the lowest closing price since Sept. 21, 2010.
DOE also reported that crude oil supplies for the week ended Nov. 14 rose by 2.6 million barrels. Gasoline inventories rose by 1 million barrels while distillate stockpiles declined by 2.1 million barrels, the agency said.
OPEC ministers are scheduled to meet Nov. 27 in Austria, where they could vote to reduce production quotas, Bloomberg News reported. But the cartel’s October oil output of 30.1 million bbd exceeded its 30 million bbd target for a fifth straight month, according to Bloom-berg data.
Meanwhile, an executive with a company that provides automated pneumatic landing gear for trailers said its system can boosts fleets’ fuel savings by reducing idling time and improving aerodynamics.
“If we’re talking only about fuel savings and efficiency, [the system] drastically reduces idling time by 97%,” said Simon Bois, executive vice president of Prime Transport Solutions.
The company’s PTS 50 pneumatic lift system automatically drops or lifts trailer landing gear in about five seconds, versus about 2½ minutes of manual crank time for a similar up-or-down action, Bois said.
He said the landing gear can save fleets at least $368 in fuel costs per truck per year, depending on the cost of diesel and number of drops per day.
