Gasoline prices expected to fall

Associated Press

NEW YORK

This week’s scary stock market plunge has a silver lining: Gasoline is about to get cheaper.

That’s because the same fears that forced a sell-off on Wall Street also brought down the price of oil.

Gas prices usually fall in late summer as families take fewer road trips. But the recent drop in oil should lower them more.

Forecasters say the national average of $3.70 per gallon could fall as much as 35 cents per gallon over the next month.

American motorists consume roughly 378 million gallons of gasoline per day, so a 35-cent-per-gallon fall would reduce daily gas spending by about $132.3 million.

“They’ll see a penny or two drop per day next week,” said Patrick DeHaan, senior petroleum analyst at GasBuddy.com, a consumer website that tracks retail gasoline prices around the country.

DeHaan said the decline will likely start at stations along highways and other busy areas.

Those stations need to replenish their storage tanks every day or so, and they’ll get the cheaper gasoline faster than others.

Of course, an unexpected surge in oil could drive prices higher again.

But traders say it would take a calamity like a hurricane in the crude-producing waters of the Gulf of Mexico to really boost oil markets now.

Oil ended the week at $86.88 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, a drop of $8.82 from the week before.