Gas Is Over $4 Again In Carver County

9 Things That Actually Help

Carver County residents are watching the dollars rack up instead of the gallons when they fill up their tank these days. They used to just look at gallons.

The Minnesota average that day was right around four dollars. A month before that it was $3.62. A year ago it was $2.96. And on the last Saturday in February, before any of this started, the average price of a gallon of regular in this state was $2.79.

That's a real number for real people. It's the drive to work, the drive to practice, the drive out to Waconia to check on your mom.

Why it happened, in plain terms

Here's the part nobody explains to you while you're standing at the pump.

You aren't really buying gas from the station. You're buying it from a global market, and that market runs through a few narrow places. One of them is the Strait of Hormuz, a stretch of water in the Persian Gulf that about a fifth of the world's oil passes through on its way to everywhere else.

At the end of February, the United States and Israel struck Iran. Iran closed the strait. That fifth of the world's oil stopped moving, and the price of crude jumped in every country at once, including in counties like ours. There was a tentative deal in June and prices came down for a few weeks. Then the talks failed, the shooting started again, and the price went right back up.

So when someone tells you the pump price is about state policy, be a little skeptical. It isn't. And I want to be honest with you about my own side of that: no state senator sets the price of crude oil. Anybody who tells you they can walk into the Capitol in St. Paul and get your fill-up down by Friday is selling you something. I'm not going to do that.

What we can actually decide

What Minnesota gets to decide is how much of our own fuel we make.

We already do better at this than most states, and it showed. Through the worst of the spring, Minnesota drivers paid noticeably less than the national average, because we sit next to Canadian and North Dakota crude, we have two refineries, and we blend ethanol from eighteen biofuel plants right here in this state. Farmers in this part of Minnesota grow the corn that goes into that. When the world market seized up, that cushion was worth real money to people in this district.

I'd like more of that cushion, not less. Fuel we grow here. Power we generate here. Money that stays here.

That means the ethanol plants, and it also means wind and solar, and it means being serious about the fact that an electron generated on the prairie west of us cannot be held hostage by a strait halfway around the world. I'm not romantic about any of it. Every one of those has tradeoffs, and I'd rather argue about them honestly than pretend they don't exist.

But all of that is a ten-year answer, and your tank is a this-week problem. So here's the short game.

9 Tips To Help Manage Your Gasoline Costs

1. Look before you fill. The spread across Carver County is usually significant, and the cheap station is often not the one you drive past out of habit. GasBuddy tracks it station by station here, updated by other drivers. Two minutes on your phone before you leave the house. If you'd rather see the county-level averages, AAA posts those too.
2. Check your tire pressure. Weirdly, the highest-return thing on this list costs nothing and takes about four minutes. The correct number is on the sticker inside your driver's door, not on the tire sidewall. The Department of Energy figures proper inflation improves your mileage by about 0.6% on average and up to 3%, and that every single psi you're low costs you another 0.2%.
3. Ease up on the gas pedal. Fuel economy falls off fast above about 50 miles an hour. The DOE's estimate is that every 5 mph over 50 is like paying an extra 29 cents a gallon. Hard acceleration and hard braking cost you another 15% to 30% on the highway. Nobody's asking you to crawl down 212. I'm saying the last five miles an hour are the expensive ones.
4. Stop buying premium you don't need. If your owner's manual says regular is fine, regular is fine. Premium in a car built for regular does nothing for you except cost more.
5. Look at Unleaded 88. It's usually a few cents cheaper, it's blended with more Minnesota corn ethanol, and the state is spending about $5 million to expand where you can buy it. One caution, and I mean it: check your owner's manual first. It isn't approved for every vehicle, and I'm not going to tell you to void your warranty to save nine cents.
6. Chain your trips, and clean out the trunk. A cold engine burns noticeably more fuel than a warm one, so four separate errands from a cold start cost you more than the same four in one loop. Post office, hardware store, groceries, home. And while you're at it, take the heavy stuff out of the back. An extra hundred pounds runs you about 1% of your mileage.
7. Don't idle. Idling gets you zero miles per gallon, and it burns a quarter to a half gallon an hour depending on your engine and whether the AC is on. If you're sitting in a pickup line for more than a minute, shut it off.
8. Use the rewards you already qualify for. Most of the grocery and convenience chains here run fuel discount programs, and a lot of people are enrolled and never redeem them.
9. Look at SouthWest Transit. For anyone commuting into Eden Prairie, downtown, or the U, the math has changed at more than. four dollars a gallon. There are express routes out of East Creek Station in Chaska, SouthWest Village in Chanhassen, and Carver Station, and one-way fares run in the two-and-a-half to three-and-a-quarter range. It doesn't work for every schedule. It works for more of them than it did in February.

One more thing

I don't know when this ends. I don't think anybody does, including the people making the decisions. One thing we do have in our control is the ability to change the people making disastrous decisions.

If every one of these saves you a few dollars a month, that's not nothing. It's also not enough, and I'm not going to dress it up as a solution to a problem that started nine thousand miles from here.

But it's what I've got today, and I'd rather hand it to you than sit on it. If you've got one that works and I missed it, send it to me. I'll add it to the list, and I'll credit you if you want me to.