The weekly average retail diesel price used as the basis for most fuel surcharges made another move higher Monday, the same day when the futures price of diesel plummeted on the quick end to a potential supply disruption.
Moving up 8.6 cents a gallon to $4.475, the weekly price published by the Department of Energy/Energy Information Administration has now risen in seven of the past eight weeks. It was unchanged in the one week it did not rise.
It has increased 70.8 cents a gallon during that time, to the highest level since it was reported at $4.539 a gallon Feb. 6.
The gains at the pump are starting to get near to equaling the increases in the futures price for ultra low sulfur diesel on the CME commodity exchange. On July 3, the DOE/EIA posted its average weekly retail price at $3.767 a gallon. That was the final price in the string of declines before the eight weeks of gains since then.
The DOE/EIA price’s 70.8-cent increase since July 3 is not far behind the 82.64-cent rise in the futures price of ULSD in that stretch. That gap has been narrowing during the recent run-up.
The highest retail DOE/EIA price since February was posted on a day when the futures price of ULSD took a tumble, dropping 10.38 cents a gallon, the largest one-day decline since July 5. And it came just one trading day — Friday — after a 15.11-cent increase, the largest one-day upward move since January.
What drove the market into a two-day wild swing was the status of Marathon Petroleum’s Garyville, Louisiana, refinery. That facility, at just under 600,000 barrels a day, has one of the largest capacities of any refinery in the country.
The Friday closure was necessitated by a spectacular tank fire and an accidental release of naphtha, according to media reports.
But it was reported Monday by several news outlets that Marathon (NYSE: MRO) had begun returning shuttered units to operation, leading to the sharp decline in diesel futures. Gasoline futures also fell Monday, by just over 8 cents a gallon, even as crude prices rose.
In other diesel market developments in the past week:
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