Today’s fuel price musings - Lowest gas prices since spring of 2007

1 comment October 27th, 2008

With the continued drop over the weekend, the Rockford metro average is as low as it’s been since April, 2007, back around the time this whole mess was starting. Oil is also around levels from back then, meaning we’re finally back to some equilibrium in pricing.

Bob Trojan and others have asked me to chart the rise and fall of oil vs. gas prices, and I finally found a great chart online, via gasbuddy.com. It doesn’t chart local prices, just state and national (but the state average has always been close to Rockford’s). Also, the gas data relies on people posting prices on the Web site, not AAA/OPIS’s data, but it’s still instructional. It shows, as I’ve said all along, that gas prices never jumped up near as much as oil did, and were slower in coming down to make up for that:

Here are today’s prices (as always, courtesy of AAA’s fuelgaugereport.com):

Gasoline: Rockford dropped three cents to $2.72 a gallon. We have the third-highest gas prices in the state. The Illinois average dropped almost three cents to $2.83. The national average dropped three cents to $2.67. Illinois has the 13th-highest gas prices in the nation, including the District of Columbia.

Diesel: Rockford dropped five cents to $3.39 a gallon. Unfortunately, we’ve seen that level a lot more recently (this February). We have the ninth-highest diesel prices in the state. The state average dropped almost six cents to $3.56. The national average dropped four cents to $3.44. Illinois has the 10th-highest diesel prices in the country.