The Labor Day holiday has a special attraction for Iowa drivers — steadily shrinking prices for unleaded gasoline, something not seen in a long time. Triple-A’s Rose White says we’re not the only beneficiaries:
Prices are actually falling across the country, and she says in the past week we’ve seen crude-oil prices drop from 78-dollars a barrel down to 69-dollars, and processed unleaded fuel prices fifty cents a gallon. Right after B.P. announced their Alaskan oil pipeline would have to shut down following the discovery of some corrosion problems, White says we saw prices escalate in the trading market.
The prices climbed to $2.30 a gallon for processed unleaded fuel, before state and federal taxes, but today the price is around a dollar-70 a gallon. She says that fifty-cent difference is being passed on to consumers. The best news is that lower prices are yet to come.
We haven’t yet realized the impact of that drop in the commodities market, and she says you can look for prices to go lower at the retail level) It’s also been an uneventful hurricane season, and White says we haven’t seen the interruption of refinery operations that cut gasoline supplies a year ago.
Other factors helping to drive down prices include the end of the summer travel season. The Energy Information Office reported late last week that refined gasoline inventories are about five-percent above where they were a year ago.