Average Gasoline Price in U.S. Tops $3

Refinery problems and higher driver demand in the East drove retail gasoline above $3 a gallon nationally over the last week, the Energy Department said Monday.

California motorists still pay about 22 cents a gallon more than their counterparts elsewhere, but they saw a rare mid-driving-season decrease in prices at the pump last week.

“At the end of the day you need to have stable supply, and things have been running smoothly west of the Rockies and it has been a little bumpy from the Great Plains on east,” said Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst for the Oil Price Information Service in New Jersey.

In California, drivers paid an average of 2 cents less for a gallon of self-serve regular Monday compared with a week earlier, while motorists nationwide paid an average of 1.4 cents more a gallon.

That put the average cost of self-serve regular in California at $3.220 a gallon, almost 68 cents above the year-earlier level, according to the government’s weekly survey of about 800 U.S. filling stations nationwide.

The U.S. average reached $3.003 a gallon, up more than 71 cents from a year earlier, but short of the post-Hurricane Katrina record of $3.069 a gallon recorded Sept. 5, 2005.

Kloza said that driver demand for gasoline was high in the lower Atlantic and Gulf Coast states, where the Energy Department reported increases of 3.4 cents and 3.1 cents a gallon, respectively, during the week.

Kloza said “demand gets flat to lower as one moves west.”

Oil futures also rose Monday on the New York Mercantile Exchange on refinery news from the U.S. and abroad, analysts said.

September futures for light sweet crude closed 62 cents higher at $75.05 a barrel on the Nymex after it was announced that a crude distillation unit at Venezuela’s Amuay refinery would be shut for five to seven months after a fire last week.

Amuay is a top supplier of U.S. gasoline imports and part of a 940,000-barrel-a-day complex that is among the world’s largest.

In other news related to gasoline supplies:

* Exxon Mobil said it planned to shut two units at its 349,000-barrel-a-day refinery in Beaumont, Texas, for three to four weeks of maintenance in August.

* ConocoPhillips said it was seeking to set up temporary cooling towers at its Wood River, Ill., refinery after storm damage suffered last week.

“We don’t have the spare refinery capacity we had in the past, so any disruption anywhere has an immediate impact,” said Phil Flynn, vice president and senior market analyst for commodities trader Alaron Trading Corp. in Chicago.