The price of regular gasoline is likely to stay steady over the next few weeks and will then fall and rise as the new year moves along, according to one expert, despite promises from President-Elect Donald Trump and despite this week's attempt by President Biden to shut down new oil and gas drilling in large portions of the Gulf of Mexico.
Gasbuddy's head of petroleum analysis Patrick de Haan says there isn't a lot presidents can do to greatly influence oil, natural gas and gasoline prices.
"Shutting down production where none currently exists [like what Mr. Biden's trying to do] has no impact on prices, in addition it may slow down future expansion plans, but it's not a drilling ban, it restricts new drilling that could take place.
"President Trump had promised to cut energy prices in half his first day in the White House, but that is very unlikely to happen at all simply because oil prices are not determined so much by a president, they are broadly determined by global supply and demand balances."
"Gasoline prices will start their seasonal increase in the weeks ahead, that's just because of seasonality.
"Demand for gasoline will start to go up, although it's pretty low right now, with average gas price in Houston at $2.51 a gallon.
"I think gasoline prices will camp out in the mid-$2 range for the next couple of weeks but by mid-February prices will start their seasonal rise - that's because demand for gasoline starts to rise just at the same time refineries begin their maintenance before the summer, then we start our transition to summer gasoline."
De Haan admits you can't predict the future, of course, but you can keep an eye on long-term trends, such as yearly trends of gasoline prices and their cyclical rise and fall.
So the most likely reason the normal petroleum market cycles de Haan has been describing here would be disrupted is geopolitical uncertainty, the most notable of which "would be a potential fraying of relations the US has with other countries, an example of that is the US throwing large tariffs on both Canada and Mexico [as Trump has mentioned], those are new risks in addition to all the geopolitical risks that we already have such as Russia's invasion of Ukraine," de Haan added.
