Record oil price to affect people beyond the pump

More than 70 percent of products in supermarkets contain petroleum.

COLUMBUS (AP) — Anyone with a car knows all about the record prices of wholesale crude oil.

But buyers of CDs, golf balls, lipstick and even pantyhose also should be feeling the effects soon. Those and dozens of other products contain at least some oil, which passed $100 a barrel during trading for the first time last week.

Terry Fleming, director of the Ohio Petroleum Council, said the list also includes perfume, deodorant and food preservatives.

“I think people do forget this. They get so angry at the prices at the pump,” Fleming said.

It’s difficult to guess how much more those items will cost. That will depend in part on how much petroleum they contain. Fleming said more than 70 percent of products in a supermarket have at least some petroleum.

The petroleum in the lids on plastic coffee cups could raise the cost of drinkers’ java fixes.

“Over a period of months, it may eventually drive up the price of that cup a penny or two,” said James Newton, chief economic adviser for Commerce National Bank. “It won’t be one of those things when we see oil hit $100 a barrel and see Starbucks raise the price of coffee 5 or 10 cents a cup.”

A barrel of oil contains 42 gallons of petroleum. In the U.S., about 34 gallons of that goes to gasoline, home heating oil and diesel and jet fuel, according to the American Petroleum Institute. Less than a half-gallon of each barrel goes into such products as DVDs, crayons and house paint.

But it adds up: Americans go through about 21 million barrels of oil a day, up from 17 million in the early 1990s.

“We shouldn’t play it up too much, but we shouldn’t ignore it,” Newton said of petroleum’s part in so many products. “With a lot of those [products], oil is a rather modest contributor.”