(NewsNation) — A lot of gas stations in western Florida have run out of gas and getting them restocked once Hurricane Milton passes won’t happen overnight, said an expert who tracks gasoline prices nationwide.
“Almost a quarter of gas stations in Florida don’t have gasoline,” said Patrick De Haan, Head of Petroleum Analysis at the gasoline analysis site GasBuddy. “In Tampa … 63% of stations don’t have gasoline right now,” he told NewsNation’s “CUOMO.”
Once the storm passes, De Haan said it could be a few days, or it could be two or three weeks, before every gas station in western Florida can fill up.
“It’s not like these outages are going to just magically going to solve themselves. There are still a lot of complications from this storm.”
He said that those complications involve the main gasoline gateway for most of the Gulf side of Florida, he said.
“A lot of it’s going to be contingent on the Port of Tampa and Port Manatee. Potentially, there could be damage. The Coast Guard’s going to have to do assessments to see if those ports can accept shipments of barges from Texas and Louisiana refineries,” said De Haan.
He added that, in the rest of the U.S., gas prices are beginning to stabilize following four years of downs and ups, starting with demand plunging during the COVID pandemic then surging in the first months of the Russia-Ukraine war.
“Now, a couple of years into this, we’ve seen a little bit of normalization happening. The U.S. is still producing a record level of crude oil. The U.S. is still the world’s largest energy producer, and that’s part of the reason why gas prices have gotten closer to what many Americans consider normal,” said De Haan.