Annual gas price pinch more like a punch at the pumps
Ottawa drivers should expect to keep feeling a pinch at the pumps, with gas prices set to creep higher on Tuesday than they’ve been all year.
The average price of a litre of gasoline ticked up to 134.1 cents per litre on Monday, up from the previous 2018 high of 131.3 cents per litre on May 1, according to gas-price tracking website GasBuddy.com. At some stations, a litre of gas was selling for as much as 137.6 cents.
“Right now we’re seeing what is a fairly typical run-up in prices this year,” said Jason Parent, a consultant with the Kent Group. “Pretty much every year in the spring, we see wholesale gasoline prices rise. That’s being driven up by rising demand and tighter supply.”
Gas prices are a fairly reliable, if blunt, vehicle by which larger trends have the power to affect the average Canadian. The recent increases in the price of gasoline are no different, and are the result of both normal seasonal trends in the oil industry and comparatively less normal geopolitical tensions.
Spring is normally when consumers start noticing, and thus feeling the effects of higher gas prices as oil refineries transition to producing more costly summer-blend fuel. Typically, pump prices peak in mid- to late-May because of it.
On the less conventional side current geopolitical events are creating concerns for the oil industry.
“I think we’re back to where we were prior to 2014,” said Dan McTeague, a petroleum analyst with GasBuddy.com, where oil prices were most affected by “geopolitics and scarcity, or supply disruptions.”
With the United States pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal, concerns that some supply will be knocked off-line has started to nudge the price of crude oil higher.
And instability more generally in the Middle East could have a more significant impact.
“Obviously, if Israel and Iran were to start shooting at each other, this could have an impact,” said Jean-Thomas Bernard, a professor in the economics department at the University of Ottawa.
“A lot of oil is produced in this region.”
And then there’s the elephant in the room when talking about gas prices in Canada: pipelines.
But while the bitter debate between Alberta and British Columbia surrounding the Trans Mountain pipeline plays out is partly to blame for abnormal prices in B.C.’s Lower Mainland, where prices there have soared above $1.60 per litre, “that has no impact on what’s happening in Ottawa,” Parent said.