Originally Posted by Mako

Has nothing to do with OPEC or price gouging, OPEC is actually struggling to relieve price pressure. They want to get gas down as soon as possible as they don't want the American people getting smart and forcing congress to enact legislation that funds the research of widescale alternative fuels, thus curtailing long term demand for their precious black gold

It has to do with increased gasoline demand in July/August, which overloaded our refineries ability to process oil, combined with Katrina knocking a dozen Gulf refineries offline during the same peak timeframe. Rita then appeared, and while not strong enough to do major damage, forced the accelerated restarts of the platforms/refineries to be put on hold another three weeks.

Any other questions I can answer for you today Rinaldo?

Gas pricing will fall, but not for another month or so. And as commodities investors exit Oil en masse (as they have the past three days, thus lowering the price per barrel by over 20% versus its August peak already) the situation will return to fairly normal levels in Q1/06.