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Posted on: Sunday, March 9, 2008
Honolulu gas price may hit $4 by summer By Greg Wiles
Advertiser Staff Writer
How are you coping with rising gas prices? Send an e-mail to hawaii@honoluluadvertiser.com to tell us about it.
It may not be long before you're paying $4 a gallon for regular unleaded gasoline in Honolulu, perhaps as early as this summer.
Prices of premium and medium-grade gasoline already have spilled over the $4-a-gallon mark on Maui, and the Honolulu average price for diesel fuel set a record of $3.879 on Friday.
Passing the $4 mark for regular will add about $200 a year to the gas bill of an average Honolulu driver.
"It probably represents taking your wife to dinner four times," said David Hackett, president of Stillwater Associates LLC, an oil industry consultant. "You do hear restaurants saying, 'Yeah, we're feeling it.' "
Rising gas prices can hurt the broader economy as consumers have less to spend elsewhere. And the prices could change motorists' habits.
"The days of just hopping in your car and just driving without thinking about the cost of fuel, those days are gone," said Barney Robinson, operator of two service stations, in Kahala and the airport area, and a gasoline dealer since 1985.
"It's a lifestyle adjustment that a lot of people have to make."
Some motorists are already taking steps, such as cutting back on driving by consolidating trips to stores, work or school into a single outing and buying cheaper grades of gasoline.
"Getting around is just getting very expensive," said Terry McBarnet, vice president of Maui Oil Co., a Kahului-based distributor of gasoline on Maui and Lana'i and operator of Paia Chevron. "I think everybody is finding energy to be very expensive. Certainly I am."
The statewide average price of regular has gone up 9.6 cents in the past month and 25 percent in the past year. Crude oil futures started 2007 around $60 a barrel, and have surged ever higher, hitting a new intraday record of $106.54 on Friday. Gasoline prices tend to follow crude prices.
There are a myriad of factors for the increase, most of which are little comfort to people paying $50 or more when filling their gas tanks.
Around the state, budget-conscious drivers are dusting off fuel-saving practices from September 2005, when hurricanes Katrina and then Rita disrupted production and wheeled already rising prices above $3 a gallon for the first time.
According to American Automobile Association data, the peak price for regular came on Sept. 18, 2005, when the average at Hawai'i stations was $3.68.
At the time, West Texas Intermediate crude futures prices were in the $60- to $70-a-barrel range. Last week, a barrel of the sweet crude was trading in the low $100 range.
That has some oil experts saying $4 a gallon gas could be a reality this summer. Hawai'i already has the highest average gasoline price in the nation.
"It certainly could get to $4, but we're not calling $4 yet," said oil consultant Hackett. "Mostly because I hope it won't."
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