Feb. 10, 2003 – Crucian filling station owners began shelling out an additional dime a gallon for regular and premium gasoline and diesel fuel over the weekend, as ongoing labor and political unrest in Venezuela and an impending war in the Middle East continued to send gas prices soaring nationwide.
Hovensa spokesman Alexander A. Moorhead, vice president for government affairs and community relations, announced the increases for the refinery's St. Croix fuel customers on Monday, noting that the change had taken effect on Friday.
It was the second hike this year, and a heftier one than the first. On Jan. 3, Hovensa announced increases of 5.5 cents for regular, 6 cents for premium and 10 cents for diesel.
Now, Hovensa sells regular gasoline to retailers for 95.5 cents, premium gasoline for 99 cents and diesel fuel for 94 cents a gallon.
The increases neither surprised nor upset some customers, wholesale and retail alike.
"People in the Virgin Islands enjoy the cheapest prices for gasoline worldwide," Lionel's Service Station owner Gabriel Lionel said Monday — speaking perhaps for St. Croix, if not for St. Thomas and St. John. He said his customers noticed the price increase, but no one complained about it.
Regular gas at Lionel's station is $1.24 a gallon, and premium is $1.39 a gallon. He said people seem to understand the price hike.
St. Croix residents do enjoy cheaper gas prices than consumers in most other areas of the United States. According to the findings of an Associated Press survey, the average weighted price for gasoline nationwide, including all grades and taxes, was about $1.63 per gallon as of Friday. The last previous survey, on Jan. 24, showed the average price at about $1.52 a gallon.
On St. Thomas and St. John, customers have long been accustomed to pump prices close to, if not in excess of, $2 a gallon.
A news report out of Charlotte, North Carolina, put gas prices at their highest level since the days following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C.
Analysts have contradicting outlooks over whether U.S. prices will go higher or level out.
Trilby Lundberg, whose Lundberg Survey compiles information from 8,000 national stations, said warmer weather in the East, increased production in Venezuela and seasonal reductions in the demand for crude oil should keep prices steady in coming weeks.
But Stanley Black, an economics professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said unrest in the Mideast could affect gasoline supplies for many months.
The interruption in the shipping of crude oil from Venezuela, a nation crippled by strikes that began in early December, has caused Hovensa to implement drastic cost-cutting measures, including the laying off of several hundred workers employed by contractors at the refinery. Hovensa is a joint venture of Amerada Hess, parent company of Hess Oil Virgin Islands Corp., and Venezuela's giant state-owned oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela.
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