Oil Rockets Past $90, As Forces Push It Toward $100

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Apr 28, 3:07AM EDT · Published Dec 7, 7:01AM EST

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Oil, just $75 a barrel two months ago, rocket past $90 which raises the specter of $3 a gallon gasoline for at least the next two months.

The factors which have driven prices higher are not likely to go away and may get worse: the value of the dollar, Chinese crude consumption, and the chance of a very cold winter in the northern hemisphere.

The American Petroleum Institute recently said that stockpiles will likely continue to fall in the US.

As was true in 2008, speculators who anticipate a drop in supply and a possible drop in supply from OPEC could push prices much, much higher. OPEC ministers say that their nations cannot make money unless crude is well above $70. They may use the current spike to refill their treasuries which were depleted when crude fell below $40 early this year.

Due to the rise, the traffic on the nation’s roads may be a little light this Christmas. Gasoline prices have spiked up and are well above $3 on the east and west coasts.

The average price for regular gasoline at U.S. filling stations rose 3.92 cents to $2.9121 a gallon,the Lundberg survey reported according to Bloomberg. “What we’re seeing is really just the tip of the iceberg,” Trilby Lundberg told the news service today in a telephone interview. “At the retail level, we could see another six to eight more cents” per gallon as refiners pass through higher crude costs.
People who normally get a piece of coal in their stockings will get a gallon of gas this year instead.

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.