Miracle Gas Price Drop in the Heat of Summer Vehicle Madness

U.S. refineries are working overtime to ensure that gas prices stumble a little bit in the middle of a season that peaks in the number of cars on the road.

The average price for regular gasoline at U.S. pumps dropped 9.04 cents in the last two weeks. Prices are now around 3.5795 a gallon. This information is based on information gathered from about 2,500 filling stations by the Camarillo, Calif.-based Company.

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Refineries process more petroleum then they ever had since 1989 causing retail prices o decline.

'It's really a mid-summer gift,' Trilby Lundberg, the president of Lundberg Survey, said on Sunday. 'Refiners have been on a kick to run more crude, run at high rates and to cut price.'

'There is an abundance of gasoline, inventories are high, and refiners are cutting to chase those summer sales,' Lundberg said. 'We can expect gas prices to keep migrating down, though maybe not to this extent.'

The highest price of gasoline was found in the lower 48 states. In San Francisco, it was priced at around $4.03 a gallon, and in Tulsa, Okla., it was priced at an average of $3.23.

Regular gasoline averaged $3.83 in Long Island, N.Y., and $3.96 in Los Angeles.

The average price for gasoline is about 10 cents less than it was a year ago. It's a rare drop considering the rise in the price of global crude oil.

On the week that ended after July 18, Refineries processed over 16 million barrels a day. Plants are taking advantage of this boom. Gasoline futures on the Nymex dropped 1.5 percent, to 2.8653 a gallon in the two weeks that ended Friday, July 25.

Crude inventories also dropped, for the fourth straight week actually, to 371.1 million in the seven days that finished the week of July 18.

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