Gasoline Price Breaks Unprecedented 123-Day Losing Streak With Half-Penny Rise
Just when the U.S. was pennies away from reaching $2 a gallon at the pump, prices rebounded.
Retail gasoline in the U.S. climbed 0.5 cent Jan. 26 to average $2.038 a gallon, keeping Americans from filling up on $2 fuel for the first time since March 2009, data compiled by the Heathrow, Florida-based motoring club AAA said. The rise breaks an unprecedented 123-day streak of consecutive declines.
A combination of stabilizing oil prices and refinery upsets curbing fuel production have put an end to the slide in gasoline that the U.S. government has estimated will save the average household $750 this year. Prices have dropped by more than $1 a gallon in four months.
“With seasonal refinery maintenance around the corner, it was just a matter of time that you saw gasoline prices go up,” Michael Green, a Washington-based spokesman for AAA, said by telephone Jan. 27. “It’ll be interesting to see if the national average can make it below $2 a gallon. It could take a significant drop in oil prices or higher refinery production to send prices downward again.”
West Texas Intermediate oil traded in New York capped its first weekly gain since November in the seven days ended Jan. 16 and has traded near $45 a barrel since last week. Crude accounts for more than half of the cost of gasoline, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Pump prices have risen in two regions of the U.S. since last week, the Midwest and the Gulf Coast, while the rest of the country’s gasoline continued to fall, the EIA said in a price survey Monday.
Husky Energy Inc.’s 155,000-barrel-a-day refinery in Ohio halted production after a fire Jan. 10. The plant was running at 80% capacity today, a message left on a community hotline shows.
Two refineries in the Gulf Coast, Phillips 66’s Sweeny plant in Texas and Exxon Mobil Corp.’s Baton Rouge complex in Louisiana, have shut fluid catalytic crackers in the past week, according to the Louisville, Kentucky-based energy data provider Genscape Inc.
“We shouldn’t be too surprised that the streak has been broken given that crude oil prices have been around $45 a barrel,” Andy Lipow, president of energy consulting company Lipow Oil Associates LLC, said by phone from Houston. “We’ve seen a number of refining problems, both scheduled and unscheduled, that have supported gasoline prices.
