U.S. motorists may spend record sum on gas

The average daily price of a gallon of regulargasolineintheU.S. this yearhasnever reached the highs seen in 2008, when the current all-time record of $4.11 was reached. Theaverageprice in 2012neverclimbedeven as high as it was last year, when it peaked at $3.97, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Yet fuel prices have been so consistently highthis year that Americanmotorists are on pace to spend a record amount —- $483 billion, or $1.32 billion a day — on fuel for their cars and trucks, according to Oil Price Information Service,.

That would break the old record for the amount of money spent by Americans on gasoline in a single year — set in 2011 — by about $12 billion. Even though the U.S. average price topped out this year at $3.94 a gallon back in April.

Analysts note that high gasoline prices didn’t have the chilling effect on consumer spending in 2012 that they did four years ago, during the Great Recession.

“Americans seem to have accepted the news on high fuel prices with aplomb,” said TomKloza, chief oil analyst for OPIS.

Gasoline prices this year were driven, in part, by high oil prices. They were also affected by consistently high exports of U.S.produced diesel and gasoline to customers overseas.

A third factor: regional spikes that helped keep the national average high. The first of those occurred in the Midwest, where petro- leum-pipeline ruptures and refinery outages kicked prices sharply higher. The second occurred in California, where prices hit a newstate record in October of $4.67 a gallon, which sparked calls for federal and state investigations of refinery practices. More recently, damage from Hurricane Sandy along the Eastern Seaboard shut down several refineries andledtotemporaryfuelrationingin parts of NewYork and NewJersey.

Those problems canceled out slumping U.S. demand for motor fuel — about 8.7 million barrels a day so far this year, its lowest level since 2001, Kloza said.

There is some good news: While in 2011 the average price of gas for the entire year was a record $3.53 a gallon, the price of fuel nextyear is expectedto average about$3.44 a gallon, the Energy Department said.