Harvey fallout means more gas pains over long weekend, analyst predicts

If you’re planning a road trip this long weekend, it may roll over your wallet.

Petroleum industry analyst Dan McTeague predicted Ottawa would see a five-cent rise in gas prices Friday followed by a whopping ninecent-per-litre hike Saturday.

McTeague blames “Harvey mixed with the fact that Canada doesn’t have much in the way of competition at the refinery level, so these prices are passed on in a nanosecond.

“We do have a very, very tight, finite supply of gasoline and so we’re really signalling to the Americans, who are probably going to be in a bit of shortage after this long weekend, that we don’t have spare gasoline. That’s why prices have risen dramatically as they have.”

In Ottawa Friday morning, drivers reported gas prices topping out at 123.9 cents a litre, according to ottawagasprices.com. The cheapest gas was 109.9 cents a litre.

Late Thursday night, one motorist spotted gas at 129.9 cents a litre at a Nepean gas bar.

“All told, by tomorrow we will have seen a 20-cent-a-litre increase” since Harvey hit Texas, McTeague said.

“Someone will say, ‘That’s not true, I bought gas at 99 cents last week.’ That’s because retailers in Ottawa tend to love to throw away their operating margins to use gasoline as a loss leader. That’s a skew. You don’t see that in every city. You see it in Ottawa.”

Hurricane Harvey has shut down a string of Gulf Coast refineries and U.S. gas output is down by almost a third. McTeague doesn’t expect prices to drop until refineries and pipelines are back online.

Meanwhile, expect higher gas prices to be reflected in everything from the cost of groceries to plane tickets, he said. mgillis@postmedia.com