Here’s Why El Paso Gas Prices Are Way Down
A few months ago I wrote an article about the way gas prices spike seem to spike whenever there is a world event that gas retailers can take advantage of. Conventional wisdom goes that if there is a hurricane in the Gulf Coast or unrest in the Middle East, we'll feel it in our wallets pretty quickly.
There was a big spike in prices in September of last year that happened right after an attack Saudi Arabian oilfield. The Saudis are, of course, a major supplier of the world's crude oil. The attacks on the oil fields meant that 5% of the world's supply of oil could have been disrupted. It didn't take much time for gas prices to spike.
Over the past week or so, I had noticed that gas prices were really low. In one case near my house on Montana and Hawkins, gas was less than two dollars a gallon.
There were quite a few cars waiting to take advantage of the great price and pretty soon, I noticed that there were other places around town that also had lower gas prices than I had seen in quite a while.
This was at Mesa a few days ago:
This was at Edgemere and Airway:
Turns out the reason we are seeing such low gasoline prices is because we are still getting winter gasoline according to the Oil Price Information Service. Officials say we will continue to have low prices for the time being but don't get too comfortable because when the winter gasoline blend runs out gas prices will go up.
Prices in the spring and summer should be around $2.55 to $2.60, as you can see in this picture from last September, that's still better than it was.