VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) — Just in time for the weekend, gas prices are predicted to fall after months of record highs in the Lower Mainland.
Dan McTeague, senior petroleum analyst at GasBuddy.com, says on Thursday, Metro Vancouver drivers can save six cents a litre when filling up. Further out, in Langley, he foresees even lower prices.
“The highest prices you will see is $1.389, you could see them as low as $1.329,” McTeague says. “I notice, in Langley, they often completely gut their 12-cent retail operating margin, so you could see prices as low as $1.279.”
One of the reasons for the drop in gasoline prices, he says, is a lower price for a barrel of oil. He adds demand for it is sliding globally and that reverberates throughout the market.
“Certainly, for the Pacific Northwest, refiners are catching up and today they discounted gasoline by almost 17 cents a gallon on the markets,” he says. “So that will start to show up certainly in the U.S., in Washington State and Oregon, but it also means that within 24 hours, we tend to see price changes on the market.”
Generally, he says, winter gasoline is less costly than summer gas because refiners do not need to use additives to prevent dissipation, which could happen in hot summer months. Those additives are less expensive during winter, McTeague explains.
“It’s also important to recognize that much of the United States refining is heavily tilted towards gasoline. It’s not quite the same thing in the rest of Canada,” he says.
“There has been a pretty disproportionate separation of gasoline-to-Diesel prices, and Diesel this time of year gets very expensive because it’s also a proxy for agriculture and mining, and more importantly, heating oil in many parts of North America.”
— with files from Jonathan Szekeres
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