So, around my house, gas is.. get ready for this.. $2.89 a gallon.
UNDER THREE DOLLARS, PEOPLE.
The reason? Because gas around my hood SKYROCKETED to $4.50 a gallon when Hurricane Ike (didn’t) hit. It stayed that incredibly ridiculous price for a good month. And people around here? We tightened our belt. We carpooled. We didn’t go out if we didn’t have to, and we would hit all of our errands the few times we DID go out.
And gas has gone down.
I’m hoping you’ve seen a decrease in your hood, too. I’m hoping you can now fill up your car without worrying (as much!) about the outcome. But more than anything else, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don’t go all gas crazy now.
Demand went way down; so did the prices. If we all start driving stupid again, demand goes back up. (So does the price. You dig?)
So, people, please: be smart. Still conserve. I think things are going to worse before they get better, but even if I’m wrong, we’re all moving in the right direction.
Dont Celebrate just yet, Opec is meeting next week to consider rolling back production….
In a related note, I am doing everything I can to get the US to roll back Grain Production …
No Gas for us? NO BREAD FOR YOU! (soup nazi!)
But for now … 2.59 in my neck of the woods… Hmm I wonder how many gallons I can put in the bath tub?
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It is $2.77 across the street from my house right now and has been climbing down for a week now. I am loving it. Now that I am one of those annoying SUV drivers, it costs a small fortune to fill up my tank. Fortunately, that lasts me nearly two weeks.
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Also, people, please don’t start buying SUVS again just because gas has gone down! It’s a threat to the environment and you will become a slave to the gas companies.
I just got home from Hawaii where it was $4.40/gallon… the day we left (and had to gas up the rental) Costco had it for $3.75. When I told my sister-in-law she almost did a cartwheel and they drove an hour out of their way to fill up there. Needless to say I did a few cartwheels myself when I got home to prices being under $3!!
It was $2.65 here in Florida this morning. I almost caused a wreck to turn into BJ’s and fill up. I was afraid it would go back up by this afternoon.
I disagree with everyone. Kepp gas at $5 a gallon so the nation doesn’t forget why we hate Bush so much!! We can drop the prices after Obama is in. Also, notice the push for cleaner and more reproducible fuel sources since the prices hikes. It has been a good way to move energy technology forward…painful for the poor like us, but good. (i know I am in the SEVERE minority. It is just a thought:)
Um… Okay.
Ike may not have caused the massive damage expected, and we got off fairly light to the oil industry as a whole, but to say it didn’t hit and didn’t impact gas prices isn’t entirely accurate.
In preparation for Ike, nearly 30% of the US refining capacity was shut down. That 30% represents the majority of the southeastern gas supply. In the wake of Ike, we didn’t have an oil shortage, we had a refined gasoline shortage.
Following that with the panic over gas prices, and the shortage became a crisis. Gas stations could not get gas for several days. Refilling the millions of gallons normally buried in the ground at gas stations around the southeast drove up the price of refined gas. While oil companies restarted several refineries quickly following Ike’s passage, some had damage, while minor, that took several days to repair and get the units restarted.
As the flow of gas returned to normal, we’ve seen gas prices drop back to pre-Ike levels. Supply went up, prices went down. We’re now in the post summer travel season, a time when demand for gas naturally goes down, and the increase in supply is even greater so prices go down accordingly. Any boost to the falling demand caused by conservation only drove the prices back down again.
This is not to say that the oil companies are blameless here. Gas prices in neighboring areas did not spike as sharply has here in the southeast. Memphis, for example, saw much less gas price jump than Huntsville. We get nearly all our gas from the gulf. Memphis, however, gets gas from the midwest and the gulf. The supply there didn’t dry up like it did here. So we’ve got a pretty serious gas distribution problem in this country, and issue that conservation will never address.
We also have a serious lack of private reserves of gas. As a result, with the refineries shut down gas supplies dried up. Had the oil companies stockpiled gas in strategic locations, they could have supplied a steady stream of gas through this minor crisis. Instead the companies were unprepared and gas prices show it.
I guess my only point is that gas prices jumped for pretty straightforward economic reasons, and returned to the lower prices of today for pretty straightforward reasons. Although straightforward, they didn’t lack in complexity. And conservation alone is NOT the reason gas has gone down. There are significant other factors involved. And plenty of blame to go around. Oil companies, consumers and gas retailers all did things to make the situation worse.
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