The seasonal pattern is still in place: a narrowing of the spread between gasoline and diesel prices which began over a month ago. But there is also a bounce-back in the prices for crude oil, from the low set on January 29th. On that date WTI traded below $44/barrel, now it is around $52.
That may be, but it seems like every town and community has a subset of filling stations that will jack up diesel whenever gas goes up, even if other stations stay the same or go lower.
Case in point one of the (many) Shell stations in my area that has one of those really poor old diesel pumps that probably doesn't see much traffic. It jumped a while back from $2.399 to $2.859 overnight when gas prices spiked a while back. It's been there ever since even though gas eventually came back down. That's around 30¢ higher than everyone else in the immediate vicinity. I remember posting about
another Shell (seriously, we have them at about a 4:1 ratio of every other brand) that jumped $2.559 to $2.959.
And now that gas is creeping back up after its initial big spike, diesel is creeping as well. Yet another Shell north of me just raised diesel from $2.99 to $3.29. Gross, when you can drive about 2 miles further down and get a different Shell selling for ~$2.659 (credit).
The low end is still barely clinging to $2.479 at a few stations, at least according to GasBuddy. Most of the diesel prices in my list this morning couldn't be trusted as we have a visitor from OK who is just making up every grade for every station in town, over-writing correct prices in some cases. I went out and fixed as many as I could earlier today but I missed a bunch due to time constraints.
. Goodbye to 2 buck plus a gallon D2, it was fun while it lasted 