The recent spike in gasoline prices caused by Hurricane Harvey should last no more than a few weeks, said AAA spokesman Don Redman.
“It should be pretty short-lived,” Redman said. “Most likely, by mid-September to the end of the month, prices will start coming back down.”
Harvey hit the Texas gulf coast in late August, causing widespread wind damage and flooding in its path – which included Houston.
The spike in fuel prices was caused by the temporary shutdown of oil refineries in east Texas, which affected 18 percent of the nation’s fuel supply. But many of those refineries are back in operation and others are expected to resume production by the end of the week, Redman said.
“What you saw in the price of fuel was a direct response to the storm,” Redman said. “On Aug. 28, the Mississippi average was $2.12 per gallon. Three days later, it was $2.21 and today the statewide average is $2.45.”
The average price for a gallon of regular gasoline in Columbus and Starkville Tuesday is $2.49, according to gasbuddy.com.
“The biggest problem wasn’t fuel production as much as distribution,” Redman said. “Immediately after the storm, there wasn’t the infrastructure needed to move to fuel where it needed to go.”
Locally, there are no shortages of fuel, said Matt Bogue, director of marketing and operations for Dutch Oil of Columbus. Dutch Oil is the distributor for Shell Oil throughout North Mississippi.
“We haven’t had any supply issues at all,” Bogue said. “I was on a conference call earlier (Tuesday) and we were told that the Colonial pipeline, which provides fuel throughout the Southeast and up the East Coast, is back on line, so access to fuel won’t be an issue.”
Bogue said uncertainty over how the hurricane would affect supplies may have led to some isolated outages.
“There may be a few rolling outages at individual stores, but those are most likely a case of poor planning or maybe a little bit of panic. Somebody will see something on Facebook about gas prices going up or shortages and people overreact. But locally, we have all the fuel we need. There are no problems.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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