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InsightJim A. Roth

Possible summer effect on gas prices

By June 13th, 2022No Comments
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Jim Roth’s Friday column, Earth Business, appears in The Journal Record.
Originally published in The Journal Record on Apr. 17, 2015.
View Jim Roth’s attorney profile here.


Jim Roth is a Director and Chair of the firm’s Clean Energy Practice.

Most consumers have assumed for years that gasoline prices will increase in the summer. New research from the Center for Economic Analysis suggests that this perception is false, and that Midwestern gasoline prices do not tend to increase in the summertime when motorist hit the highways.

The center has studied weekly gas prices since 1995 to isolate summertime gasoline prices. They utilized data for two gasoline formulations, including the price of conventional regular unleaded and reformulated regular unleaded.

In the late summer of 2014 gasoline prices started to drop, and they kept dropping, to lows not seen since early 2009. Economists now expect these suppressed prices to remain through 2015.

Both AAA ad GasBuddy.com recently released statements saying the national average price for a gallon of gas is expected to be $2.35 from Memorial Day through Labor Day, during the summer driving season. The Energy Information Administration projection put summer gasoline prices at $2.45 per gallon.

The latest AAA Fuel Gauge Report indicated the national average price for regular unleaded gasoline has fallen for 24 of the past 30 days, after reaching a peak-to-date price for 2015 of $2.46 per gallon on March 7.

See the rest of the column here:

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