The spring-summer 2025 gasoline demand picture is not festive. It is flagging. Not celebrative for anybody—refiners, marketers, retailers and motorists are faring OK, but that's all.
Refiners paid a bit less for crude oil in the past two weeks, but the gasoline margin improvement for them was a mere partial recovery from prior conditions. Lundberg daily wholesale price surveys show a rise of two pennies in the past two weeks, but due to timing and incessant competition, retailers “ate” the loss, losing 2.4 cents per gallon (CPG) of regular grade margin, according to the most recent Lundberg Survey of U.S. fuel markets. As this column said on July 14, refiners did gain a little and retailers saw margin erode.
During the latest week, wholesale price moves were mostly gentle and in both directions, with lots of 1- to 2-cent cuts in branded and unbranded in PADD 2, and rack hikes and similar small amounts in PADD 3.
The current retail regular-grade margin is 33.5 cents. Not acutely low but no party, either. The overall 2024 average margin was a nicer 37.71 CPG.
Refiners have now upped capacity utilization by 0.8 percentage point, to an aggregate 95.5%.
The downstream as a whole, refiners and retailers, are putting a pretty nice spread on the table for motorists, but motorists are not heaping their plates.
Gasoline consumers, apart from having been saved from a modest pump price hikes by the fact of retailers' margin loss, also currently have a price discount of 36 CPG under the price this time last year. It will take more than those two deliverables to unleash summer abundance in gasoline demand.
Click here for previous Lundberg Survey reports in CSP Daily News.
Trilby Lundberg is publisher of the Lundberg Survey of U.S. fuel markets. Lundberg Survey Inc. is based in Camarillo, California.
Members help make our journalism possible. Become a CSP member today and unlock exclusive benefits, including unlimited access to all of our content. Sign up here.