Gas Prices Vs. Gas Prices

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.

April 2, 2012 | 3:47 PM

Gas prices have been a major theme on the StateImpact Pennsylvania website: both cratering natural gas prices, and soaring gasoline prices. Why are these two prices going in opposite directions? The New York Times took a look at the issue this weekend:

Crude oil is a relatively efficient international market, in which the product moves around the globe in tankers that can be diverted from one destination to another almost instantaneously in response to shifts in demand. A sharp change in demand or supply in any region of the globe is likely to show up in prices everywhere.
Oil prices can also be affected by geopolitical concerns well before actual events take place. These days, it appears that oil prices have been pushed up by worries that Israel might attack Iran, leading to a drastic reduction in Iranian oil exports.
The natural gas market, on the other hand, is not a global one. There is a limited trade in liquefied natural gas, which can be transported in tankers, but mostly natural gas must move in pipelines over land. Natural gas prices have been rising in Britain this year even as they have been falling in the United States.