CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Even though the Colonial Pipeline is back online, there’s still a fight for gas across the Carolinas.
"I’d pay anything to get gas,” Shaikh Talawally said.
Talawally finally found gas at the shell in Uptown after his car completely ran out.
“I live around University City, and all around there’s no gas," Talawally said.
Talawally even used the can he got to put gas in a friend’s car that ran out in the line at the same station. It was the second car WCNC saw run out in line at the Shell.
“It'll be probably one to two weeks in most of these areas until buying gasoline isn’t something you have to think about, meaning you pull in and don’t have to worry about them being out," Patrick De Haan with GasBuddy said.
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De Haan said until then, people should be on the lookout for price gouging.
“If you saw a station go up like 40 cents or 60 cents, that’s in quite a bit of excess of the market price,” De Haan said.
De Haan said the price jumped an extra 19 cents in the Tarheel state because of the pipeline but should come down a bit.
“It probably won't go back down 19 cents, and that’s because oil prices have continued to move up since this event started," De Haan said, "so you may see prices go down 5 to 10 cents over the next couple of weeks.”
But the decline may be short-lived, because Memorial Day is just a few weeks away, almost certainly promising travel.
“We’re getting in our cars, we’re taking vacations, we’re feeling better about the economy and so our demand for fuel goes up, and that in turn pushes gas prices higher," De Haan said.
De Haan said the only way we could see gas prices go lower at this point is if we all collectively stopped getting gas for a few weeks, as that would drive that demand down. He said that is not likely to happen as the world opens back up.
Contact Lana Harris at lharris@wcnc.com and follow her on Facebook, Twitter and on Instagram.