Sign with gas prices at an Arco gas station in Moraga, Calif., Jan. 30, 2022.
Gado/Gado via Getty ImagesThe average price of a gallon of gas hit the $5 mark in five San Francisco Bay Area counties for the first time ever on Thursday, AAA said. Others are close.
Marin ($5.071), Napa ($5.109), San Francisco ($5.067), San Mateo ($5.042) and Sonoma ($5.087) all reached the threshold. Other counties are inching close: Alameda ($4.999), Contra Costa ($4.976) and Santa Clara ($4.974). Solano County at $4.952 a gallon has the cheapest gas in the Bay Area.
California has the highest gas price in the United States at $4.940 a gallon as of March 2. The Bay Area has some of the highest prices, but remote Mono County east of the Sierra Nevada has the highest average in the state at $5.680.
The price of a barrel of crude oil is the main driver of gas prices, and it rose steadily last year due to an imbalance in supply and demand caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Demand came back from the pandemic very quickly, in part because many people are avoiding public transit,” Severin Borenstein, an energy economist at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, told SFGATE last week. “Supply is not coming back as quickly, but drilling is now accelerating.”
After Russia launched an invasion against Ukraine last week, the price of oil took another big leap, rising over $110 a barrel and trigging another big jump in prices.
AAA spokesperson Aldo Vazquez said the price of a barrel of oil was about $60 in August and last month was hovering around $90 a barrel for several weeks. Last week, it rose to $100 and this week, it hit $110 a barrel.
“Now that Russia has invaded Ukraine, the United States and its allies have imposed more significant financial sanctions on Russia,” Vazquez said. “Russia is retaliating by keeping away its oil from the global oil market, and that is having significant impact on the price of crude oil.”
Vazquez said he doesn't see prices coming down anytime soon. "The longer this war goes on, the more it's going to have impacts on a lot of aspects of our lives and the price of gas is one of those," he said.
