This picture was taken nine years ago tomorrow in Lime Springs, near the Minnesota border. It was the first time I had ever seen super unleaded at $2 a gallon in Iowa. Then this week, this happened:
Forecasters say ample oil supplies and weak U.S. demand will keep a lid on prices. The lows will be lower and the highs won’t be so high compared with a year ago. … AAA forecasts the national average will peak between $3.60 and $3.80 in the spring, then drop to between $3.20 and $3.40 by mid-summer.
Largely thanks to an oil and gas production boom in this country, gasoline prices are expected to top out somewhere between $3.50 a gallon and $3.90 a gallon this year, according to Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst at the Oil Price Information Service. Last year’s top price was $3.94 a gallon, set in early April.
Average prices for the year are expected to be lower too. Kloza is predicting an average of $3.25 to $3.50 a gallon. That’s considerably lower than last year’s average of $3.60 a gallon — which caused U.S. motorists to spend a record $479 billion at the pump.
And because those are national estimates, here’s Radio Iowa, January 11 (“Report: Gasoline prices in Iowa should be lower in 2013 than 2012”):
“We don’t expect the peak this year to be near $4 as we did last year, actually twice in the Midwest,” Weinholzer says. “We expect the peak to be more in the $3.60 to $3.80 area, but as a whole, the national average will be below last year by about 20-cents on average throughout the year.”
In May 2012, gas hovered in the $3.35-$3.50 range. The price pictured above is the third-highest I have ever seen in Iowa, behind only $3.949 on July 16, 2008 and $3.919 on July 4, 2008.
Sioux City hit $4 a gallon and it’s worse in Minnesota.
This week made it a particularly bad time to try anything related to an increase in Iowa’s gas tax.