Written by Nicholas Vetrisek
The average gas price in San Diego County is $3.43 per gallon. That is about where prices were prior to the pandemic in February of last year.
According to GasBuddy.com, a tech company that helps drivers find the cheapest place to purchase gasoline, the average price of regular-grade gasoline at stations in San Diego County has risen 22 cents per gallon in just the last month. Experts are attributing this primarily to the county reopening and decline in production due to the pandemic.
Patrick DeHaan, GasBuddy’s head of petroleum analysis, said that “We’ve learned a lot about the coronavirus since last March and April when we didn’t know anything and everyone was kind of frozen in step … So as we get back to normal, or at least closer to normal, we are naturally seeing demand for gasoline go up.”
There is also the fact that U.S. oil production has dropped from 13 million barrels per day to 11 million per day, with similar declines in the OPEC nations.
And while gas prices are already high, they may be getting higher in the future.
That’s because when Joe Biden entered office, two of his first actions were to end the Keystone XL Pipeline project and freeze drilling on federal land. Both of these decisions will decimate the U.S. energy sector and drastically reduce the oil supply, in addition to likely costing the United States its energy independence.
Much of the reason for especially high prices in California compared to other areas also has to do with the lower pollution gasoline required by the state, which is different and more expensive to produce than the fuel used in the majority of the country.
