U.S. drivers are looking at the highest prices for gasoline at the pump since at least 2013, with prices for oil eyeing $100 a barrel --- a level it hasn’t...
U.S. drivers are looking at the highest prices for gasoline at the pump since at least 2013, with prices for oil nearing $100 a barrel — a level it hasn’t reached in more than seven years — in the wake of Russia’s move into Ukraine.
Retail gasoline prices were already on the move, with the average national price for regular unleaded at $3.541 a gallon Tuesday morning, according to travel and navigation app GasBuddy. They’re up 2.1 cents from Sunday, and up nearly 21 cents from a month ago. Prices stand at their highest since the summer of 2014, GasBuddy data show. A move to $3.75 or more would lift the per-gallon cost to the highest since about March 2013.
“If there is a supply disruption in Russia or elsewhere, then prices could move very quickly as we have seen in the past,” says Ryan Fitzmaurice, commodity strategist at Rabobank. During the Libyan civil war of 2011, Brent went from $90 to over $125 in just four months, and U.S. retail gasoline prices shot up to nearly $4 a gallon from around $3 at the start of the event, he says.
The group of producers reached an agreement in July of last year to raise monthly production starting in August 2021 by 400,000 barrels per day to phase out the 5.8 million-barrel in production cuts introduced in 2020.