Gas Prices Are on the Rise Again

By Jim Carroll, Erie Times-News, Pa.

Feb. 10–With a Ford Explorer that gets 15 miles to the gallon and facing a 40-mile daily round-trip commute, Adam Cressley has enjoyed the five-week-long slide in area gas prices.

But that came to an end Friday when he pulled into a Country Fair in Meadville and found the pump price had jumped 6 cents this week to $2.25 a gallon.

Gas prices headed up this week throughout the Erie region by 4 to 6 cents, as crude oil again briefly broke through the $60-a-barrel mark in futures trading.

At one point in January, oil prices dipped below $50 a barrel.

But even with the bump up in price, AAA reported that, at an average price of $2.252 Friday, gas at Erie-area stations was selling at about 4 cents a gallon cheaper than one year ago.

“I thought it might be going up,” said Cressley, a 19-year-old Atlantic resident who works as a security guard in Meadville.

But Cressley also said he hopes to get one more price break before gas prices make an expected rise during the summer driving season. “I would be satisfied if it went to, I’d say, $2.09 a gallon.

That’s something federal energy analysts can’t promise Cressley, but they did offer drivers some hope this week.

The Energy Information Administration has issued its latest Short Term Energy Outlook, and the analysts, at least at this point, see national average pump prices averaging $2.35 a gallon in 2007 — and that would be lower than the 2006 average of $2.58 a gallon.

Granted, 2008 is a long way off, but the federal energy analysts believe average national gas price will bump up to $2.43 for that year.

Unreasonably warm temperatures in the United States and through much of the Northern Hemisphere reduced the demand for heating oil, and eased all petroleum and natural gas prices, the EIA reported.

But the cold has set in, tension between the United States and Iran is ratcheted up, and Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries is talking about production cuts.

And with all that, crude oil futures briefly rose above $60 a barrel on Friday for the first time in 2007.

David Poor, the Erie-based regional president for the East Central AAA, said he also hopes drivers get one more break in prices before the traditional driving season, which starts in May.

But he said that is no sure bet. “Prices could keep going higher if the cold weather sticks around through March … or if OPEC makes production cuts. That could mean prices heading higher.”

Meadville resident Gail Mooney, a student at the Great Lakes Institute of Technology in Erie, also was filling up Friday and hoping for lower prices to make her daily commute easier on the budget.

But Mooney said she believes gas prices are a guessing game. “They go back and forth. I don’t think anybody knows what they are going to do.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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