Alisha Tripp typically drives more than 400 miles a week from her home in Trenton, Ga., and regularly checks online price apps such as GasBuddy.com to find the cheapest price.
On Monday, the lowest price was conveniently on her route to Chattanooga in Lookout Valley, where a pair of gas stations just off I-24 were selling regular gas at $1.91 per gallon – 30 cents below the average in the rest of Chattanooga and the cheapest price of any gas station in Tennessee or Georgia.
“This is great,” Tripp said as she refueled here Nissan Altima on Monday afternoon at the BP Circle K station on Browns Ferry Road. “When you drive as much as I do, this really makes a difference.”
After jumping nearly 50 cents a gallon following Hurricane Harvey in late August, local gas prices have dropped for five consecutive weeks and are expected to decline again this week, according to analysts.
“While prices nationally remain an average of 20 cents higher than a year ago, we’ll likely continue to see improvement at the pump into a sixth week as supply outpaces demand and gasoline inventories continue their slow recovery as we soon close out an active hurricane season,” said Patrick DeHaan, head of petroleum analysis for GasBuddy.com
The web site GasBuddy.com said seven stations in the Lookout Valley area were selling gas Monday below $2 a gallon. But among the 170 stations regularly sampled in the Chattanooga market by GasBuddy, the average price of regular gas was $2.21 per gallon. That was down 9.3 cents per gallon from a week earlier and down nearly 33 cents per gallon from a month ago.
Chattanooga gas prices averaged 24 cents per gallon less than the U.S. average of $2.45 per gallon at the start of the week.
But local gas prices are still 16.6 cents per gallon above the same time a year ago.
Oil prices climbed Monday to settle at their highest level in nearly three weeks after Iraqi forces reportedly seized the city of Kirkuk and its surrounding oil fields from Kurdish forces Monday. At the same time, a monthly report from the Energy Information Administration said shale crude-oil production from seven major U.S. oil plays is expected to edge up by 81,000 barrels a day in November to 6.12 million barrels a day.
November West Texas Intermediate oil rose 42 cents, or 0.8 percent, to close Monday at $51.87 a barrel – the highest price since Sept. 27.
Contact Dave Flessner at dflessner@timesfreepress.com or at 423-757-6340.
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| Chattanooga Gas Prices provided by GasBuddy.com |