Just as Americans are starting to hit the road for the holidays, the average price of gasoline at the pump has dropped below US$2 a gallon for the first time in more than six years as crude oil production continues to surge.
The average pump price fell to US$1.999 a gallon at about 4pm New York time on Saturday, according to data from GasBuddy Organization, a price tracker based in Gaithersburg, Maryland. That compares with an average price of US$2.11 a month ago and US$2.44 one year ago.
Low oil prices tied to overproduction and to lower seasonal demand are “the main catalyst” for the decline, said Patrick DeHaan, a senior petroleum analyst at GasBuddy, in a telephone interview.
“America is the world’s largest oil consumer, and in the winter months demand is reduced,” he said.
Consumers are benefiting from a 68 percent drop in West Texas Intermediate crude over the past 18 months. That has boosted refiners’ profit margins, encouraging them to produce record amounts of fuel. Prices are poised to remain lower into next year after the OPEC refused to limit its output.
The price of West Texas Intermediate crude dropped to US$34.73 a barrel on Friday, the lowest since February 2009.
US refineries produced 9.83 million barrels a day of the motor fuel last month, 2.3 percent higher than a year earlier, the American Petroleum Institute said on Thursday.
Americans have saved about US$100 billion on fuel this year, which comes to more than US$350 a person, according to Michael Green, a spokesman in Washington for the American Automobile Association.
The drop in gasoline prices has coincided with an increase in demand, which rose to the highest level since August last week, the US Energy Information Administration said on Wednesday.
“It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a combination of low prices at the pump and a healthy economy,” DeHaan said. “The last time that occurred was back in 2005.”
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained