This week for gas prices might be like the last hours of a great party that you wish could last longer, but you know is starting to wind down.
In the Lehigh Valley, many major stations were selling regular gas for between $2.49 and $2.59 on Monday, GasBuddy.com reported. Prices in New Jersey were cheaper.
On Friday, the average price for regular in New Jersey was $2.32 a gallon, but discount stations ranged between $2.07 and $2.09, according to GasBuddy.com. An average price of $2.20 or less wasn’t hard to find.
There are two factors that drivers can thank for keeping prices low at the pump — lousy demand for gas and tremendous supplies of it. But low gas prices aren’t going to last much longer, experts said.
What caused cars to line up at this Speedway station on Amboy Avenue in Edison was the lowest price in the state of $2.07 for regular on Friday. Larry Higgs | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
“This week we hit an all-time high for the U.S. in gas inventories at 259 million barrels,” said Tom Kloza, Oil Price Information Service global petroleum expert. “We hit the all-time high for crude oil stocks, they have never been higher.”
The federal Energy Information Administration reported that 518 million barrels of crude oil are in storage in the country. That sent crude oil prices on a bit of a roller coaster last week to land at $53.37 and wholesale gas prices landed at $1.51 a gallon on Friday on the New York Mercantile Exchange, NASDAQ reported.
The glut of winter blend gas in storage is like brown bananas at the grocer, he said. Their shelf life is limited. Winter blend gas will have to be sold to make room for spring reformulated gas, which could be good news for consumers, Kloza said. But he cautioned not to expect the kind of drops that were seen one year ago when prices hit a bottom of $1.30 a gallon.
“It may give us the false sense that prices will drop like they did last year, but that won’t be the case,” he said. “Last year, February was off-the-charts high for demand. The catalyst was the price was so cheap.”
That’s not the case this year, even though Kloza said drivers will see prices decline a few cents a gallon into March.
“It’s a “Failure to Launch” (scenario), but it will launch,” Kloza said. “We’ll see demand surge and plenty of driving. We’re averaging $2.32 (in New Jersey), that’s the layover to $2.75.”
Larry Higgs may be reached at lhiggs@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @commutinglarry. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
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