Diesel Falls 1.2¢ to $2.583 a Gallon, Oil Holds
The U.S. average retail price of diesel dropped 1.2 cents to $2.583 a gallon as oil prices remained below $50 a barrel and U.S. rig counts pushed higher.
Diesel now costs 31.7 cents more than it was a year ago, when the price was $2.266 a gallon, the Department of Energy said May 1.
Regional prices for trucking’s main fuel were mixed, with declines everywhere except in New England and the Rocky Mountains regions.
The U.S. average price for regular gasoline slid 3.8 cents to $2.411 a gallon, and was 17.1 cents higher than it was a year ago, DOE’s Energy Information Administration said.
It was gasoline’ first decrease after four consecutive increases.
Gasoline prices fell in all regions, and ranged from $2.196 in the Gulf Coast to $2.879 in the West Coast, EIA said.
Investors had been expecting crude oil prices to rise to $55 or $60 a barrel in light of the OPEC deal to reduce production but prices never reached that level, Tariq Zahir, a New York-based commodity fund manager at Tyche Capital Advisors, told Bloomberg News. “You started the year with longs. They’re giving up on the trade to a certain point.”
Crude’s highest price this year was $54.45 on Feb. 23.
West Texas Intermediate crude futures on the New York Mercantile Exchange closed at $48.73 per barrel May 1, compared with $49.23 on April 24.
At the same time, the U.S. rig count increased to 870 during the week of April 21, up by 13 from the week before and 450 more than a year earlier, oil-field services company Baker Hughes Inc. reported. Bloomberg described the string of increases as the longest stretch of gains since 2011.
Baker Hughes ranks No. 14 on the Transport Topics Top 100 list of the largest private carriers in North America.
Crude oil production in the Permian Basin — encompassing West Texas and Southwest New Mexico — involved 340, or 47%, of the total 857 rigs that were operating as of April 21, EIA said. Production is likely to increase there to about 2.4 million barrels per day in May, based on estimates from EIA’s latest Drilling Productivity Report.
The Permian rig count peaked at 568 in late 2014 before falling to a low of 134 in spring 2016, EIA said.
