and Canada - remained persistent, and the market responded to extremely high oil and gas prices in the spring and early summer.įirst are the macroeconomic drivers of the market for crude oil, which is then refined into gasoline or other products like diesel or jet fuel. Russia’s ability to produce and export oil - although not to the U.S. In short, many of the fears of late May and early June when prices spiked turned out to be short-lived, for good and ill. And, in North America especially, where no new refineries had been built since the 1970s, capacity had shrunk as some refineries shut down in 2020.īut across the country, the average price at the pump is $4.04 a gallon, which, while not exactly low, is much lower than the over $5 price tag in June. 2022 was also supposed to be the year the world economy recovered from covid-19, bringing oil demand back up to 2019 levels. While outside the United States many countries never formally adopted an embargo against Russia, there were fears that “ self-sanctioning” would remove millions of barrels per day from the world oil market.

There were many reasons to believe the fall in oil prices couldn’t happen.

What happend to the gas