Mid week rise in crude to cost consumers
Gasoline to increase, distillates to fall

Media release

Conception Bay South, NL, December 17, 2008- Consumers in Newfoundland and Labrador will experience a slight bump in gasoline prices this week when the Public Utilities Board moves to adjust prices this Thursday.

“The sudden rise of crude oil to near $48 US a barrel Thursday of last week also brought with it an increase in the basic cost price (spot) of gasoline and this is going to affect consumers to a degree. We would have hoped that prices would have kept falling but, bad news and speculation late last week from OPEC and the chance of a major production cut in the offing, both helped to increase spot prices to all fuels. However it is only gasoline pricing that will experience an increase, that amounting to 3.1 cents a litre at the pumps on Thursday”, said George Murphy of the Consumer Group for Fair Gas Prices.

“Numbers show the rapid rise in spot prices that began shortly after the huge adjustment down last week. We also expected to see a much larger drop in distillate prices carrying on from last week but the increase in spot prices mitigated that. Numbers are still showing down by 8/10ths of a cent for heating and stove oils and 1.3 cents a litre down for diesel fuel.

“Since the spike last week, I have recorded a steady decrease, albeit slow, that hopefully will translate into this increase in gasoline as being an anomaly in the petroleum markets. Considering that the markets are now speculating that any OPEC cuts will have no effect on oil pricing, we can hope that there will be further decreases to come for all fuels in the coming weeks. The economic news just keeps getting worse and that has helped to play into market traders fears of lowering demand for fuel products and those fears are slowly translating into fact.”

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For more information, contact;

George Murphy
Group researcher
Consumer Group for Fair Gas Prices
gasprices@hotmail.com

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