STATEWIDE–Now that gas prices have increased across Indiana again, GasBuddy says it is best to wait as long as you can to fill up.

“We’ll probably start to see stations lowering prices in the days ahead. I think you should probably wait, but if you find a station with prices that are quite a bit lower than that $3.99 mark, take advantage of it. Oil prices have been falling. That fall in the price of oil means that stations will start to lower their prices as the weeks progress,” said Patrick DeHaan, head of petroleum analysis for GasBuddy.

DeHaan says there is an imbalance between supply and demand for gas. Demand keeps going up with warmer weather returning and people wanting to travel more while supply has not kept up.

“Part of the reason we’ve been thrown further out of balance is the Russia war in Ukraine and how western countries basically put Russia’s oil off the market by issuing sanctions. That is eating into available global supply. The imbalance existed to begin with because COVID decimated oil consumption in 2020. Oil companies cut production to better match that and have only been slowly increasing oil production,” said DeHaan.

Oil prices have been dropping lately due to COVID infections rising in China and other parts of the world. President Biden released one million barrels of oil per day from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for the next six months, but there are other factors working against that.

“The problem is that Russia produces 10 million barrels of oil per day, so that puts that oil in purgatory. COVID combined with the war in Ukraine is why oil prices are so much higher this year than they have been in the past,” said DeHaan.

GasBuddy says the statewide average is $3.99 per gallon. It is $3.97 in Indianapolis, $3.98 in Fort Wayne, and $3.92 in Evansville.