No relief on high gas prices until January: analyst
Posted December 23, 2018 4:45 pm.
Last Updated December 23, 2018 4:51 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
LOWER MAINLAND (NEWS 1130) — It looks like we won’t be getting an early Christmas gift in the form of considerably cheaper gas.
Gas price analyst Dan McTeague with GasBuddy.com says he suspects a three- to four-cent decrease in prices will be coming soon, but not until early January.
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Prices haven’t fallen that far off recent peak in prices. He predicted prices would jump 17 cents last week after the Olympic pipeline shut down briefly and unexpectedly.
“We went up a total of 17 cents a litre, from 131.9 to 148.9, and I would have thought, by this point, prices would have come back down, but they’ve only dropped about half of that,” he says.
Prices at the pumps south of the border, however, have been consistently lower. He points to ‘chronic shortages’ of gas in the region as one of the reasons the high prices continue here, as well as high taxes in the region.
“That’s really a function of the fact that Americans have the advantage of having those refineries in their backyard,” he says. “Of course it doesn’t help that you have the second highest prices on taxes being a contributing factor.”
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If you try buying gas in Blaine you’ll see it’s usually much cheaper there by comparison.
You can listen to NEWS 1130 for gas price updates at :59 past the hour, and on Twitter @1130gastracker.
