DAYTON, Ohio -- Gas prices continued to rise for much of the past month and into the past week, but considerable relief at the pump is looking more possible.
The nation's average price for a gallon of unleaded gas shot up to $3.42 by Friday but showed signs of stabilizing for the time being as the price of oil dipped to under $80 a barrel near the end of last week before rising again.
"That's really the only things that's paving the way for what's expected over the next week, maybe two," said Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis for Gas Buddy. "The decline is likely to show up, but nothing's to stop oil from suddenly tomorrow going up four or five dollars a barrel and offsetting some of that."
De Haan said the national average could shed 10 to 15 cents a gallon over the next couple of weeks so long as oil doesn't do an about-face. That, he said, would be a decline to $3.25 or so a gallon with more $2.99s popping up again in areas of Oklahoma, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and South Carolina.
De Haan said for consumers, "it's a lot to grasp," the price of oil falling but the price of gas spiking. But as prices heat up, so does the level of competition, which will see gas stations start to undercut each other and erode the price per gallon "fairly quickly," he said.
Ohio consumers shouldn't expect gas to drop below $3 anytime soon, "but it could get close," De Haan said.
"You'll certainly see stations in pockets that are under $3 a gallon ... but the average probably won't get there, though it may get between 5 or 10 cents," he said.
Across the nation, there are still more stations under $3 a gallon than over $4.75 a gallon, he said. A little more than 5% of stations nationwide sold gas for less than $3 a gallon and about 2.5% of stations sold gas for more than $4.75 a gallon.
AAA predicted that elevated crude prices likely will keep pushing up gas prices as long as oil prices are above $80 per barrel. Oil prices jumped to a high of $81.80 on Friday before declining slightly to close at $81.17.