Have you seen the price of gas lately? Here’s what’s happening

It happened a little bit at a time, but you might be surprised how the price of gasoline has gone up while you weren’t exactly noticing.

We were, so we checked in with AAA South Dakota to see what’s going on.

“They’ve continued to increase, kind of to everyone’s surprise, because people aren’t traveling as much as they used to,” said Marilyn Buskohl, manager of public and government affairs.

“But the thing that’s really pushing up gas prices is the price of crude. That’s continued to go up.”

She points to OPEC and its allies, collectively known as OPEC+, and its surprise decision to minimally increase production in April.

“OPEC is really strategic in that what they’re doing is they are not increasing production, so it’s causing crude oil prices to continue to rise,” she said.

As of Monday, the average price per gallon in South Dakota was $2.74, up 6 cents from a week ago and 34 cents from a month ago.

Even overnight, the price of a gallon increased 3 cents to $2.77.

“A year ago, we were at $2.30,” Buskohl said.

“Honestly, we could be looking at $2.90 or higher this spring, and it hasn’t been that high since May 2018,” she said.

“It’s hard to project what it’s going to be, but I do think it’s going to continue. I think we’re going to continue to see it go up until early summer, and then it should kind of level off.”

South Dakota is pretty much tracking the national average.

Buskohl still anticipates strong demand for road trips this spring and summer despite rising gas prices.

“I do think road trips are going to be huge this spring because people are really wanting to travel and most feel it’s a safer option than flying somewhere,” she said.

“More and more” people have been calling AAA about traveling later this year and into next year, she added.

“People are really looking to book the Caribbean, Mexico, those kind of places,” she said. “We’re seeing some travel bookings in international, but it’s mostly in 2022. And especially there are a lot of countries that are kind of talking about having a health passport where you have to prove you’ve been vaccinated and all that kind of stuff, so things are a bit volatile yet.”

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