Gas Prices Should Fall Soon
Low gas prices could return soon. Anthony Inswasty/Wikimedia Commons
Area motorists should see gas prices decline now that an Indiana oil refinery has completed unscheduled repairs. In a statement this morning, BP announced that a large distillation unit at its Whiting refinery was restarted after being shut down on August 8th.
Gas prices in the Great Lakes region had risen by as much as 60 cents per gallon after the outage, but Patrick DeHaan, a senior petroleum analyst for the website gasbuddy.com, says motorists should see prices fall soon, though maybe not as quickly as they would like.
"The retail price of gasoline actually went up slower than the wholesale price of gasoline, meaning that stations were losing money as prices were soaring," DeHaan said. "They likely will look to recoup some of that lost margin by dropping prices a little bit more slowly.”
DeHaan says that if the price of crude oil remains close to where it is now, around 40 dollars per barrel, and no new problems develop, the national average for gasoline could fall below two dollars per gallon sometime this fall. According to gasbuddy.com, the average price of gasoline in Champaign this afternoon was $2.69 per gallon.