CLEVELAND — The average price of a gallon of gas rose slightly over last week in Cleveland, up 6.2 cents to $3.09 a gallon, according to GasBuddy's survey of 831 stations.
That wasn't associated with the Israel-Iran conflict, which caused oil prices to spike last Friday, but GasBuddy's Head of Petroleum Analysis, Patrick DeHaan, told News 5 that an additional hike due to that is possible in the coming days.
"All in all, prices will likely go up at some point this week," DeHaan said. "We could potentially see another hike back up to $3.19, or they could go a little higher to $3.29."
But even at that, he said we're still better off than where we were at any point in June over the last four years.
"Americans [are] still paying about 34 cents a gallon lower nationally compared to a year ago, Cleveland prices [are] about 38 cents lower than last year," he said.
And about $2 a gallon less than what we were paying three years ago this month, when the war between Russia and Ukraine upended the global markets and had gas prices here over $5 a gallon.
DeHaan said, despite what you may see online, those days are not coming back.
"I know some on social media had a warning of apocalyptic $4, $5, $6 a gallon gas for now, that's completely impossible."
That's because attacks, for the most part, have spared Iran's key oil infrastructure, causing the markets on Monday to ease.
"President Trump would probably tell Israel to avoid that type of infrastructure knowing that oil prices would likely see a significant response to that. If it were to happen oil prices could in theory eventually touch the $80 a barrel mark but we're still not talking about anything record setting," he said.
"What would be more impactful later this summer is a major hurricane, or like last year, when we had several high-level major refining outages. That would be far more impactful to what we're seeing than the situation in the Middle East, which now appears to be in the phase of de-escalation."
Where DeHaan noted a noticeable jump is with diesel.
"You might notice diesel jumping 15 to 30 cents. That's simply because diesel inventories are far lower than that of gasoline. In fact, they're almost 20% below normal for this time of year, whereas gasoline inventories are only 2% below normal for this time of year."
