Gas prices jump at the pump

If you've had to fill up recently you may have had some sticker shock with the price jump at the pumps.

The cost for regular gas was at $1.20.9 cents per litre in High River on January 3rd of this year and this week we're paying $136.9 cents per litre.

Petroleum analyst with Gas Buddy, Patrick De Haan said it's a combination of a couple things.

"The largest refinery covering the U.S. Midwest as well as the Canadian prairies suffered or did suffer over a week ago an unexpected outage and that is causing gas prices across much of the U.S. Midwest and into Canada to jump. Coupled with the fact that we are now getting into the seasonality, the change to summer gasoline is coming, demand for gasoline is inching back up and is going to push upward pressure on gas prices across Canada in the coming weeks."

The refinery issue has caused a loss of almost 38 million litres of gasoline production daily. 

De Haan also points out that with temperatures warming up it's also caused the prices to go up because of the costs of switching from winter to summer gasoline and someone has to pay for that, the consumer.

He also warns us that we can expect the months of March and April to be higher on average for gas prices this year.

And as far as the high prices for diesel fuel goes De Haan offers an olive branch of hope.

"Diesel prices are much more seasonal given the fact that it's also used as heating oil in the coldest months, but I do expect diesel prices to continue to moderate, maybe not so much as in the peak of winter, but as we get closer to spring, we could see some improvement."