Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent told reporters Wednesday that gas prices may not drop below $3.00 a gallon until late September.
Oil and gas prices have shot up since Operation Epic Fury started on Feb. 28, with President Donald Trump declaring a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz in a Sunday morning Truth Social post. Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy questioned Bessent about when gas prices would come down.
“President Trump said this morning that he thinks we’re nearing the end. The U.S. kept their side on the ceasefire. We’ve stopped firing. The Strait of Hormuz have not been completely reopened, so we will see,” Bessent said. “I’m optimistic that during the summer we will see gas with a 3 in front of it sooner rather than later.”
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Bessent added that his counterparts in the Middle East advised him that they can resume pumping oil within a week once the Straits of Hormuz were reopened.
“So not by summer like Memorial Day, but maybe by Labor Day?” Doocy asked, with Bessent responding, “Again, I’m optimistic that sometime between June 20th and September 20th that we can have $3 gas again and as I said this morning, too, we are going to be watching the gas stations because they raised prices very quickly when the stated when the crude oil prices went up. We hope they’ll bring them down just as quickly as crude oil prices have come down, which they’ve come down substantially just in the past 10 days.”
While the Trump administration reversed the Biden administration’s hostility to fossil fuel production in the United States, the average gas price has climbed from $2.98 per gallon on Feb. 28 to $4.11 per gallon on Wednesday, according to AAA.
Gas prices during the Biden administration rose to a high of $5 in June 2022, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The spike was mainly in part due to President Joe Biden’s policies limiting the production of fossil fuels and rapid inflation.
The Biden administration blamed the rise in prices first on Russia’s war against Ukraine, before saying that it was caused by price-gouging. Prices did not drop under the $3 mark until Trump was sworn into office.
WTI Futures Crude Oil closed at $91.23 Wednesday, up from the market’s $67.02 close on Feb. 27, the day before the conflict with Iran started but down from a post-Feb. 28 high of $117.63, according to Investing.com.
Energy analyst David Blackmon warned that the price increases may be long-lasting.
“So much damage has been done now to infrastructure and global flows of oil that it’s baked into the cake,” Blackmon told The Daily Caller News Foundation during a phone call. “Prices are not going to go back to where they were before February 28. You could end this thing today. Prices are not going to go back.”
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