Natural Gas May Be Cheap, But Home Heating Oil Prices Are Skyrocketing

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.

January 23, 2012 | 10:30 AM

We’ve written a lot about how low natural gas prices are leading to cheaper heating bills this winter.
That isn’t the case for people who use home heating oil, as the New York Times reports:

While natural gas prices have plummeted to 10-year lows, heating oil prices have been steadily rising for years and are expected to reach record levels this winter, precipitated by higher costs for crude oil and the shutdown of several crucial refineries in the Northeast and in Europe. The Energy Department projects a price of $3.79 a gallon over the next few months, more than a dollar above the winter average for the last five years. Analysts do not expect much relief in the longer term, either, because global oil prices are expected to stay high amid political instability in the Middle East and rising demand from developing countries.
…“The people who have been unable to switch off of heating oil will be increasingly penalized in the coming years,” said Jay Hakes, a former administrator of the Energy Information Administration and now the director of the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum. “There’s going to be a continuing incentive to get off heating oil, because every day the headlines and experts say that over the foreseeable future, we will have natural gas at attractive prices.”