Hey Look: Pennsylvania's Gas Prices Are Dropping

• Scott Detrow
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  Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.
  
  Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.
  
  Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

All year, we’ve been charting the steady uptick of gasoline prices in Pennsylvania. This week, the news is a bit different: the average price of gas actually dropped by about a cent a gallon in the Keystone State.
AAA’s Daily Fuel Gauge pegs the average per-gallon cost at $3.968 today. That’s still higher than where gas was a month ago, but it’s slightly below last week’s price of $3.978.
Lancaster has the state’s cheapest gas, at $3.92. It costs the most to fill up in Philadelphia, at $3.98.
What’s behind the declining – or at least steadying – price? CNN credits  a dip in global crude oil prices, and predicts prices may have peaked for the year.
The LA Times is a bit more skeptical, pointing out gas prices almost always shoot up in the summer:

Gasoline prices are dropping for the second straight week, but don’t get too excited. Fuel prices have peaked before mid-May just once in the past 20 years, according to Energy Department statistics, and it hasn’t happened since 1998.
History suggests that the national average won’t peak before mid-May at the earliest.
The national average for a gallon of regular gasoline fell to $3.907, down another 2 cents since last week, according to the AAA Fuel Gauge Report. Fuel prices first began to fall in California about a month ago, although the decline has been slow. The average price for a gallon of gasoline in California is $4.221, down 4.3 cents since last week and off 13.2 cents since last month.

And in Pennsylvania, you need to remember the refinery factor. If a major Philadelphia gas processing plant shuts down this summer, prices could soar. here’s what StateImpact Pennsylvania reported earlier this year:

Penn­syl­va­nia cus­tomers also catch a break because they live near major refiner­ies in the Philadel­phia area. These are the places that con­cert crude oil into gasoline.
But two of those refiner­ies closed in recent months, because of that grow­ing dis­par­ity between East Coast and Mid­west crude oil prices.
Another Philadel­phia refin­ery, oper­ated by Sunoco, processes about a quar­ter of the east coast’s gaso­line, but may shut down in July. Kloza said that may send the region’s gas prices soar­ing. “Clos­ing down that refin­ery in the mid­dle of the sum­mer is a lit­tle bit like an air­line going on strike Thanks­giv­ing week­end. That would be the worst-possible sce­nario,” he said.
The Depart­ment of Energy warns regional gas prices could “spike” if the refin­ery closes.

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