That sort of gives an indication of the price impact. It's a big decline. |
That's just starting to be felt at the pump. We know there's likely to be more price increases before they start coming down. |
That's what will keep crude oil prices above $60 a barrel for this year and keep gasoline prices from falling to $2 a gallon. We are forecasting prices to go back up this summer ... above $2.50. |
The good news is, we've seen wholesale prices of gasoline go down in recent days. |
The market feels fairly comfortable with the crude it has at these prices. It's difficult for me to envision (the OPEC offer) having too much of an impact. Crude inventories here in the U.S. are looking pretty good. |
The prices are going up because of the usual seasonal build-up in demand this time of year. The reason we still have prices going up when inventories are seemingly abundant is that there's a lot of uncertainty about gasoline supplies in the future. |
Then it really depends on how the summer unfolds with demand and summer vacations. |
There may be certain parts of the country that see that, but for the U.S. average I don't think we have anything nearly that low. |
There's a lot of uncertainty about the summer. |
There's still crude out there that can make up for any loss in production. |
We don't see prices going as low as $2.50 any time this summer. They could bottom out much higher than that. |
We may see another week or two of increases. |
We probably are OK (with gasoline supplies) to get to Labor Day, but the question is how much is demand going to fall off (after the holiday) and what's crude going to do and how does that impact the gasoline price. |
We think they're going to likely continue to rise for a few more weeks at least. |
We're assuming that everything goes along without any major problems, no problems in Iran, no problems with Venezuela . . . no major hurricane damage. |