The average price of a gallon of gas in Florida decreased 13 cents over the past week, despite uncertainty in the oil market following the Hamas attack on Israel.
The AAA auto club said a gallon of regular unleaded in Florida cost an average of $3.33 on Monday, down from $3.46 a week earlier. Meanwhile, the average price nationally Monday was $3.60, a dime less than a week earlier.
The decreases came as oil prices showed a slight decline over the week. However, the downward trend could stall soon, cautioned AAA spokesman Mark Jenkins.
“Ongoing geopolitical tensions allowed oil prices to regain some strength last week, though they remain below price levels we saw three weeks ago,” Jenkins said in a prepared statement.
The auto club noted current global trading trends aren’t comparable to the roughly $40-per-barrel spike that occurred after Russia invaded Ukraine last year.
The difference is that Russia is a significant oil producer, while Israel and the Palestinian territories are not, AAA said.
“As long as this war does not spread to include more countries in the region, the effect on the oil market will remain muted,” AAA spokesman Andrew Gross said in a statement.
US Oil Reserves
The conservative website Twitchy.com highlighted on Friday a recent post on X, formerly Twitter, that showed how far Biden has depleted the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
The SPR, around since the 1970s, is supposed to be the nation’s insurance policy against sudden shocks in oil supplies and gasoline prices.
As the Tampa Free Press has periodically reported in recent months, Biden has drained the SPR to its lowest levels in 40 years in an effort to reduce prices at the pump that skyrocketed because of his green energy policies and efforts to hamstring Big Oil.
The RNC posted a graph from the Energy Department that showed the SPR could supply the nation with 17 days of oil, which was less than half of the 40 days the reserve could handle before Biden began releasing it for a naked political maneuver to deflect criticism of his own green-energy moves.
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That conflicted sharply with what Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm had said as recently as July. “We have, by far, enough to be able to deal with any emergencies over the next couple of years,” she told CNN.
The problem for Biden and the rest of America is that last month, Saudi Arabia announced it was cutting its output. Since then, Hamas viciously attacked Israelis, and many are calling for a reprisal against Iran, which bankrolls the terrorist network, by hitting Iranian oil refineries.
The good news, as such, is that it would take a massive international incident before Biden could tap the SPR again.
“At this point, US energy policy has fewer bullets left. It has less levers left in its policy toolkit,” Daan Struyven, the head oil industry researcher at Goldman Sachs, recently told CNN.
“Because the level of the SPR is quite low, you would need a larger shock to energy prices or to supply to start releasing barrels again,” Struyven. “The hurdle to exercise the insurance policy is bigger when you have less insurance left.”
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