The Season of Rising Gas Prices Comes to Northeast Mississippi

NORTHEAST MISSISSIPPI (WCBI) – It’s getting to be the time of year most drivers dread.

As Spring approaches Summer, gas prices seem to climb daily.

This is a time of the year where there is a low supply of finished product.

This comes at a bad time for many in our area travelling for spring sporting events: festivals like Super Bulldog Weekend, and graduations for both high schools and colleges, but with a little patience hopefully we see a drop.

Dees Oil in Ripley tells us this is just part of the season.

“Well, we’re coming out of the winter months, which are the slowest,” said Dees Oil CEO, Michael Dees. “The refineries usually have scheduled maintenance during that time.”

Dees says during that maintenance, refineries aren’t producing.

“Now we’re coming out of that, and volumes are usually low because of the turnaround schedules with the refineries,” said Dees.

With low volumes and a high demand from warm weather travel, prices go up, and residents aren’t too happy.

“It used to be cheap way back in the past, and now it’s just skyrocketed,” said Ripley resident, Michael Cox. “Everything is too high. I just think it’s outrageous to be high. A lot of people can’t afford high gas prices.”

Dees said in the last nine months, the price per barrel of oil has gone up nearly $30.

“Normally our rule of thumb is each dollar of barrel equals to 3 cents a gallon,” said Dees, flipping through the addition of the Wall Street Journal, barrel prices on the front page.

It’s a pretty sizeable increase.

Dees says prices will continue to rise until July.

Until then, residents like Michael Cox will have to make do.

“I’ll try to get as much gas as I can as possible,” said Cox, taking the pump out of his Ford F-150. “Just there’s a whole lot a gallon. I just put $10 here, $20 there, manage me for a couple of days and then just refill it back up.”

Dees also mentioned another problem has been with pipelines, making it even harder to get finished product to terminals.

We still have a few months of rising to do, but keep a look out for July, where we may begin to see a drop.