Rita could send gas prices to $5 a gallon.

CNN/Money Story

The people that would be repairing Rita damage are already picking up the pieces on Katrina. The potential damage this weekend could be up to three million barrels a day.

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I'm going to be out of town all weekend (I'm in the Dallas area) so I'm going to miss the event, but I've already filled up. I filled up right before Katrina and everyone was telling me I was being silly... and they are saying the same thing again.

I am always amazed at how short term people will allow their memory to be sometimes.

Errr... whoops. I guess I need to top off my car again. 3 million barrels is 126 million gallons. The USA only consumes 360-380 million gallons of gasoline a day. Now, if they mean 3 million barrels of oil refining, then we drop the loss to something like 36 million gallons of gasoline, but that's still easily 10% of national gasoline production right there.

I guess this time I'll just top off my tank tonight but leave my two 5-gallon cans empty, with just my 6 gallon in reserve. I can't picture Texas getting knocked out of production for months the way some of the LA refineries are right now. We'll see though.

As for $5/gallon, there are SO MANY anti-gouging laws getting kicked around city, state and federal lawmaking assmeblies of all sorts that I don't picture any unreasonable pricing like what we saw with $6/gallon gas in Georgia last time. Unfortunately, any spike we do see will be real and thus impossible to legislate down. We need further work on the shale to oil and coal to oil technologies as well as more refineries.

If they put ceilings on price hikes, then there will be gas lines like the 1970's....

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Well what I've read about being most likely to pass are laws like this:

Upon the declaration of a state of emergency by the governor, retailers cannot raise the price of gasoline (and sometimes other goods) more than 25% above the pre-emergency declaration price.

There's been plenty of other variations too, but I agree, setting absolute price caps will only mean that retailers simply won't buy any new gasoline for delivery because they're not allowed to sell it for what they paid for it. Then again, would that be so bad? It's one thing to drive an SUV and pay a fortune to fill up. It's another to drive an SUV and not even be able to drive it because nobody has gas for you to fill up with!

The problem is that it's common to hear of cars being stranded because they ran out of gas when an evacuation order is issued. If stations decide not to purchase more, this will become even more pronounced.

all hype...they are even saying hurricane force winds where I live 200+ miles inland. But then again, once a year they threaten inches of snow (in Austin, TX) which never happens.

I think that next weekend's project will be a new fence if they winds really blow that hard. It is on its last post and half falling down now as it is

19,900 miles and (slowly) counting

You mean some of those Hummer hogs might start to care about fuel economy during a State of Emergency?

61.5mpg lifetime - 82mpg in recent months

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"fanatic" is what the lazy call the dedicated

Gulf waters are really warm, she's building up steam quickly, now category 5...

I wonder how much more of that fantasy documentary TV show "Oil Storm" will come true?

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