Gas shortages

[George2615]

Last Sunday $2.28 gallon 89 octan,today $2.73 for the same.

Same here. $2.349 last week, $2.799 today. Quite a jump in one week.

 

[Bird]

I paid $2.139 a gallon last week (Aug. 30) and today I paid $2.589 at Sam's Club, while all the other stations I saw that still had gas available were $2.659.

 

[flyerdan]

Just checked the Gasbuddy app, apparently their servers are down, presumably due to overload as everything else loads on the tablet. I would imagine that it is a perfect storm for fuel price instability, what with the holiday, the refineries off line due to the hurricane and social media fear mongering which is probably just making a bad situation worse. Pireps in local groups indicate that our prices are up about .30 since just before the eclipse, which really isn't out of line for this time of year.

 

[louisiana aquaponics]

We were hit with Rita in 05 shortly after Katrina gas shot up from a little over $2 a gallon to $4.75 peek over several months and stay that way for more then a year while all the work was going on. When it finely came down it was slow. There is plenty of gas but the news was out the day after Harvey that the future markets were betting on the price going up. Any time they can raise the price they will and as the work to rebuild starts it will keep going up.

 

[WilliamBos]

Oil has not gone up, they are milking the hurricane!

 

[Bird]

We were hit with Rita in 05 shortly after Katrina gas shot up from a little over $2 a gallon to $4.75 peek over several months and stay that way for more then a year while all the work was going on. When it finely came down it was slow. There is plenty of gas but the news was out the day after Harvey that the future markets were betting on the price going up. Any time they can raise the price they will and as the work to rebuild starts it will keep going up.

Our gas didn't spike quite that high in 05. I paid $1.749 on 1/30/2005 and the highest I paid was $2.939 on 9/9/2005. The lowest it got for the rest of the year was $1.909 on 12/3/2005. Of course that was a considerably bigger jump than we've had this year . . . so far.

 

[WilliamBos]

Social media, and of course fake news will create one though. Get it when you need to and all will be fine. They need to have an excuse to raise prhe price, even if not a valid one.

Exactly! More goughing!

 

[smstonypoint]

Oil has not gone up, they are milking the hurricane!

Let's think about this. Refinery shutdowns have reduced the demand for crude oil, so there is no reason to expect crude prices to rise in this circumstance.

The refinery shutdowns have decreased the supply of gasoline at the retail level. The demand for gasoline is price inelastic -- %change in quantity demanded/%change in own price-- is less than one in absolute value. The right-hand panel below is applicable.

Here are some estimates of price elasticities from http://econweb.ucsd.edu/~jhamilto/understand_oil.pdf.

.

Using the estimate from Brons et al., a 10% increase in gasoline price would reduce quantity demanded by only 3.4% in the short run. The price flexibility of demand is the %change in price/% change in quantity. So, a 10% decrease in quantity would increase price by 29.4% in the short run. If we use -0.25 as the elasticity estimate, a 10% reduction would increase price by 40%.

There is nothing sinister going on -- just supply and demand at work.

Steve

 

[coobie]

If you think gas prices are crazy now wait until the N.korea chit gets stupid..

 

[square1]

Diesel was $2.439 Thursday (last time I went by a station). Last night I went into town to see it at $2.799. Passed several stations, only one was closed. That one isn't a 24/7 operation so it may have been after closing time. It was dark. There was no obvious outward sign they, or any other stations were having a supply problem.