Don’t look now, but gasoline prices finally may be headed down after peaking above $2.90 a gallon in September.
The average price of regular unleaded fuel in Snohomish County has settled at $2.88 a gallon. That price has fallen by a few tenths of a cent in recent days, but has been largely unchanged since late September.
On Thursday, crude oil prices dropped for the fifth day in a row, reaching their lowest level since early August. The price on the New York Mercantile Exchange closed at $61.36 a barrel, down more than $10 from last month’s high.
“You can’t predict what’s going to happen in the market, but it’s pretty much followed crude oil,” said Frank Holmes, Northwest regional manager for the Western States Petroleum Association. “So that makes sense you’d see the prices follow crude oil, since that makes up the majority of the cost of gasoline.”
The price of fuel also is heading down across the nation, although some regions still report an upward trend, AAA’s tracking service showed.
The federal Energy Information Administration said demand for oil in September fell by 2.9 percent compared with last year.
Before drivers start up their SUVs en masse again, here’s a little perspective. A year ago, a gallon of unleaded gasoline cost $2.05 in the Seattle-Bellevue-Everett region, according to AAA. Two years ago, it was $1.77 a gallon.
And the federal government and analysts warned Thursday that continued conservation of oil and gasoline won’t be enough to make up for the shortfall created by refinery outages in the Gulf Coast region. As of Thursday, 80 percent of oil production in the area remained shut down because of the hurricanes, according to the U.S. Minerals Management Service.
A bout of cold weather in the eastern U.S. also would be enough to push oil demand and prices up again.
Holmes said that points to the need to expand oil production around the globe.
“We’re kind of at a point where demand everywhere has just continued to go up and up and up, and from a supply standpoint, it’s been fairly stagnant,” Holmes said.
Reporter Eric Fetters: 425-339-3453 or fetters@heraldnet.com.
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