After the wild swings of the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine fuel prices have been relatively stable over the last year.
The Island Regulatory and Appeals Commission schedules a review of gasoline, heating oil, and diesel prices weekly, and sometimes makes mid-week changes as well. One of the signs of that stability is there have been no unscheduled changes so far this year.
On Friday the minimum price of the pump rose 1.2 cents per litre to $1.64. Diesel was down 2.3 cents to $1.95, and heating oil was unchanged at $1.43.
Prices for gas and diesel are both within a nickel of where they were a year ago. Heating oil is up a little more. It was $1.36 per litre, 7.3 cents lower.
In 2023 fuel prices mostly followed their usual seasonal pattern, with gas prices rising in the summer and falling in the winter, following the trend of vehicle travel. Heating oil prices fell in the spring, but rose earlier than usual in the summer months, leading to the somewhat higher prices this March.
Diesel, which contains many of the same components of heating oil, jumped up at the same time.
Prices for heating oil and diesel, however, have stabilized, and are about the same as they were at the beginning of the year. Gas has been edging up, and is now 8.9 cents per litre more than it was on New Year’s Day.
In 2020, in the early months of the pandemic, the price of gas fell to $0.77 per litre. In 2022, a few months after Russia invaded Ukraine, the price peaked at $2.18.
