Benchmark diesel price drops for a third straight week

For the third week in a row, the benchmark average retail diesel price fell, down 14.8 cents a gallon over that period.

The latest price published by the Department of Energy/Energy Information Administration is $3.549 a gallon, down 3.3 cents a gallon from the prior week. It’s the lowest price since a $3.503 price published on the final Monday of 2024.

The retail price of diesel is lagging the continuing fall in the futures price of ultra low sulfur diesel on the CME commodity exchange so it may have room to fall further. 

On the CME’s ULSD contract, the price fell last Thursday to $2.1622 a gallon. It rose slightly Friday before taking a 3.72-cents-per-gallon jump Monday to $2.2038. All crude and product prices rose Monday on the back of a U.S. attack on Houthi positions in Yemen. While Yemen is not a significant oil producer, the strike was seen as a proxy for an attack on Iran, as the Houthis have significant backing from Tehran.

Those sort of temporary blips are not enough to lift a market that has been pushed down by the drop in almost all asset classes over recent weeks: equities, commodities and crypto. 

But those are short-term reactions. The monthly report of the International Energy Agency, published last week, painted a picture of a supply/demand balance that is likely a force for lower prices.

The IEA report said it is projecting that global oil supply will be about 600,000 barrels a day more than demand in 2025. If the OPEC+ group goes ahead with its plan to begin unwinding some of its production cuts in April, reductions that have been in place since 2023, the IEA sees the possibility of the supply/demand imbalance growing by another 400,000 barrels per day.

On the demand side, the IEA said, “the macroeconomic conditions that underpin our oil demand projections deteriorated over the past month as trade tensions escalated between the United States and several other countries.”

The agency’s latest demand figures have “underwhelmed.” IEA reduced its estimates on growth in the fourth quarter of last year and this quarter by a small amount. It held its growth projections for full 2025 at 1 million barrels a day, only marginally higher than the 830,000 that it projected oil demand grew in 2024. A figure that is sub-1 million is extremely rare. 

Supply growth this year outside of any increase in OPEC+ will once again come from the U.S., Canada, Brazil and Guyana, in that order, the IEA said.

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