LI gas prices climb 11 cents in week

Ouch, again.

Gasoline prices rose by another 11 cents a gallon on Long Island in the past week as the civil war in Libya continued to hit home and a refinery outage tightened regional supplies. Crude oil hit a 30-month high in trading Wednesday.

"Crude oil prices continue to just go up and up and up here, regardless of the fundamentals saying we have good supplies," said Carl Larry, president of the consulting company Oil Outlooks & Opinions Llc in Houston. U.S. crude oil futures settled at $108.83 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the highest since Sept. 22, 2008. Prices are up 25 percent from a year ago.

Regular gasoline averaged $3.906 a gallon Wednesday morning on Long Island, the AAA said. The average has risen by almost $1.08 a gallon from its recent low of $2.829 a gallon on Sept. 7, 2010. For a motorist driving the national average of 220 miles a week in a vehicle getting 20 miles per gallon, that means an extra $11.88 a week for gasoline -- or more than $47 a month.

Not surprisingly, motorists are griping. "It seems contrived that prices are going up so fast and so high," said traffic consultant Tom Moore of Smithtown, who says he drives his Chrysler PT Cruiser about 15,000 miles a year and gets about 24 miles per gallon. "It seems like it's all based on speculation -- there's worry about the war in Libya affecting gas prices, so right away gas prices are up."

But Larry offers some hope for drivers; he says strong supplies, an increase in imports of gasoline and slackening demand for the fuel suggest a flattening and even a 10- or 20-cent-a-gallon decline in coming weeks -- unless crude oil prices surge. "I think we're probably peaking right now," Larry said. He blamed the spike of the past week partly on a power failure March 28 that has shut part of a Sunoco refinery in Pennsylvania.

Libya produced only about 2 percent of the world's oil, but experts say prices are up mostly on concern about political unrest spreading to a major oil producer like Saudi Arabia.

Heating oil averaged $4.055 a gallon at full-service dealers as of March 28 on Long Island, in the most recent survey by the state Energy Research and Development Authority.

The new averages for gasoline and heating oil are the highest ever for winter; the records for both were set in July 2008 when regular gasoline locally averaged $4.346 and heating oil hit $4.93. With Bloomberg News