With the warm summer weather comes road trips, vacations, and hopefully frequent trips to the beach. The downside – high gas prices.
Gas in Port Moody on Monday morning was at $147.7 a litre, with similar prices across the Lower Mainland.
Compare that to Kamloops, which has prices of $1.14 a litre.
“It’s ridiculous,” said Chris, a Port Moody resident who was filling up at the Esso on Monday. “Who can afford this? And it’s only going to get worse.”
Not so according to Peter Linder, a Calgary based oil and gas analyst with Emerging Equities, who believes prices are going to start decreasing from here.
“Clearly gasoline supply is short in your part of the world,” said Linder, who thinks a lot of it has to do with the upcoming long weekend and the start of the summer driving season.
“I think this is the peak right now,” he said. “They’ll be coming off quite a bit over the summer.” Linder added that prices could get down to $1.20 a litre by the end of summer.
He added that gasoline prices in the Lower Mainland spiked very early this year as the demand came earlier than usual.
In his opinion the only way prices would go up again after the long weekend would be if “problems with Iran heat up again, which is possible,” he said.
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Gas across the border in Blaine is only $1.18 a litre, and as a result Canadians are flocking across the border to fill up.
“I call them crazy for sitting in the border line-up,” said Racheal who works at a Shell station in Blaine, “but the majority of our customers are Canadians.”
Jason Toews, co-founder of Gasbuddy.com, said gas prices are always higher in B.C. especially in Vancouver. He puts this down to the Metro Vancouver transit tax, and like Linder, said the prices are always high before a long weekend.
“Crude oil has a huge impact on the price of gasoline,” said Toews, as oil is only at $95 a barrel right now. “But I think this rise is more related to supply and demand.”
While there are still some deals to be had in the Lower Mainland, Toews said that is due to competitiveness between the stations, but eventually all the prices will even out.
“By next week I think we should see a little bit of relief at the pumps,” he said.
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