Local pump price increases 11 cents from five-year low

It had to happen sometime. Gas prices are going up again.

From a record-high $4.054 a gallon in mid-September, the average Triangle price for regular fell almost every day. It hit a five-year low of $1.572 on Friday.

Then we saw the first bounce in months. Some stations boosted their prices as much as 9 cents in a single day, and the regional average pump price rebounded to $1.680 on Wednesday.

So a 15-gallon tankful now costs $25.20 -- still less than half of the $60.81 in mid-September.

What happens now? That depends on which experts you ask -- and when you ask them.

The New York Times noted Tuesday that oil prices had risen more than 40 percent from a five-year low of $33 a barrel in mid-December. Citing Mideast tension and OPEC production cuts, an expert at the Oil Price Information Service said we might be paying $2 at the gas pump by spring.

Speculators were blamed for pushing oil prices back up, but it appeared Wednesday they may have made losing bets.

The Federal Energy Information Administration reported that U.S. oil reserves were much higher than market analysts had expected. That sent oil prices tumbling more than 9 percent Wednesday.

"This has been a speculatively-led rally here in the past couple of weeks," said oil analyst Jim Ritterbusch of Ritterbusch and Associates. "It didn't have a lot of fundamental impetus behind it, and now we're getting evidence that there's a lot more crude and product supply."

Crude oil has become so cheap that some traders don't want to sell it now, said market researcher Addison Armstrong of Tradition Energy.

They are leasing extra supertankers to store it at sea. They'll wait for the wind to change, and for prices to rise again.