Motorists may have noticed a slight increase in the price of gas as they filled up their tanks in recent days.
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Floridians were paying slightly more than the national average at $1.84 a gallon, which is almost 62 cents less than previous year.
Oil prices have been undercut by demand that turned out to be weaker than expected, especially in China and other developing countries. His Marathon gas station on the corner of Howard Avenue and W. Kennedy Boulevard seemed unusually busy, he said, and when he happened to look across the street at the Shell Gas station’s even higher prices, he quickly realized why. California has the fifth highest gas tax in the United States at $0.59 a gallon, which is among the reasons that gas prices are so high across the state. On Feb. 29, AAA reported that prices had gone up six days in a row for the first time since November.
Summer is around the corner, and with it the summer driving season.
The supply of gas fell 1 percent over the last week while demand has risen 5 percent, said Mark Jenkins, spokesman for AAA. That ends a string of three straight weeks of price declines. “We’ve seen just in the last week that wholesale gasoline prices have increased, we’ve seen crude oil prices go up, and as a result, the price at the pump is going up at the same time”.
Last month, commercial inventories of US crude topped 500 million barrels for the first time; they are more than one-third above their five-year average.
Jenkins said he doesn’t anticipate the higher prices to effect local travel.
“When it starts moving up to $3 a gallon, that’s when people really start to get cautious”, Jenkins said. AAA says it dropped even lower in February as wholesalers cut prices to clear out winter-blended gas.
The average price per gallon in the Wilkes-Barre area is $1.91, same as across Pennsylvania.
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Tom Kloza, an energy analyst with the Oil Price Information Service, says the peak will be between $2.10 and $2.50 a gallon.
