Gas Prices Up 30 Cents in 24 Hours

CLEVELAND – Putting gas in your tank cost about 30 cents a gallon more Thursday morning than it did a day earlier.

Depending on whose explanation you are inclined to believe, the culprit was:

a. Hurricane Ivan.

b. A wide range of market forces.

c. Greed.

Ivan closed Gulf Coast refineries, pipelines and ports, says Linda Casey, spokeswoman for Marathon Ashland Petroleum in Findlay.

The massive storm affected shipping, delaying deliveries of imported gasoline and crude oil, she said. And demand for gasoline in the Southeast was already high as a result of the back-to-back evacuations for Hurricanes Charley and Frances and the cleanup efforts that are still under way.

"It's just a domino effect, and it just hasn't let up since hurricane season started," Casey says.

But Scott Dean, a spokesman for BP Oil and BP Chemicals in Warrensville, Ill., did not point a finger at bad weather. "It's very difficult to attribute any change in prices to any single factor, because there are always so many variables at play," he says.

The Energy Department reported Wednesday that crude oil inventories fell more than expected last week. And in Iraq, insurgents earlier this week destroyed a junction of oil pipelines, also causing nervousness in oil markets.

But none of those explanations passes the sniff test, independent gasoline dealers say. The price of regular unleaded went from about $1.67 to about $1.97 overnight at many area stations.

"When they start moving these prices around like that, all they're doing is gouging," says Pat LeVecchia, owner of Pat's Citgo in Rocky River and govern mental affairs director for the Great Lakes Petroleum Retailers and Allied Trades Association.

The group, representing independent dealers in Ohio and Michigan, alleges that BP and Marathon Ashland, both big players in the Northeast Ohio market, set prices in a way that makes it hard for independent dealers to compete with company-owned stations.

"Everything they're doing matches the definition of predatory pricing," says Maurice Helou, president of the Great Lakes group and owner of a Citgo station in Lyndhurst.

Casey of Marathon Ashland, however, sees it differently.

"It's the same old Econ 101," she says. "Demand is up, supply is down."