"It will affect airlines and trucking significantly," Zandi said. "The airlines are already hard-pressed, and this is one more thing to push them under water."
The price of jet fuel has risen by 29 percent since August, to US$0.90 a gallon.
The region that relies most heavily on heating oil, the Northeast, may also face sharply higher prices, Zandi and others said. Heating oil prices are 18 percent higher than they were a year ago, according to the Energy Information Administration.
"New York City will be hit very hard," Zandi predicted, "much more than a place like Dallas or Southern California."
The effect of higher oil prices may ripple through industries that, at first glance, seem remote from oil. Consider roofing. The best asphalt for roofing comes from "heavy" crude oil produced in Venezuela. With those supplies gone, "people are scrambling already to find supplies," Brown of Valero said. "The cost of roofing will go up."
If the conflict in Venezuela were resolved and striking workers from the state oil company returned to their jobs, that would certainly bring more crude oil into the market and gradually deflate high prices. But few people believe such an outcome is likely anytime soon.
Instead, industry experts look to the OPEC, of which Venezuela is a member. Other members said at a meeting earlier this month that the group would make up for shortfalls of Venezuelan exports if the strike continued.
OPEC members like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are among the few countries in the world that have the spare production capacity to bring on stream to replace the Venezuelan oil. But it remains uncertain what steps OPEC has taken. Moreover, it takes about 40 days for oil to be shipped from the Persian Gulf to the US, which may mean that oil supplies in the Western Hemisphere may only be replenished later in January.
"The key thing now is how quickly and on what scale the other OPEC producers step up their production," said Daniel Yergin, the chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, "and that will determine in a week or 10 days where oil prices will be.
"You could have replacement supplies in late January from the Persian Gulf. But all of that assumes that nothing happens anywhere else."
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