Shared from CTV NEWS
The price for diesel was the highest on Prince Edward Island Friday morning and also over two in New Brunswick.
The price of oil is up, driving up fuel costs.
“We’ve seen demand move. 100 million barrels consumed every day to about 103 million barrels,” said Dan McTeague, petroleum analyst. “At the same time OPEC and Russia have cut back oil, and other suppliers, like Canada, the United States, just aren’t in a position to do much more than they are now.”
That impacts anyone driving a diesel vehicle day to day, and the cost the fuel is usually passed along to the end consumer. Transportation companies use a fuel surcharge to protect themselves from dramatic swings in the cost of moving products from one place to another.
It’s also a challenge for operations which use a lot of heavy equipment, like farms.
“The cost of production has soared on Prince Edward Island in the last few years, from fuel as well as fertilizer input,” said Donald Killorn, P.E.I. Federation of Agriculture Executive Director.
This isn’t a peak time of the year for P.E.I.’s key potato industry, but farmers are still working, and much of that work needs to be done with equipment that uses diesel.
The increased price is hard on farmers’ bottom line.
“Our farms are getting larger, and so they’re producing more, but the percentage of what they’re making on that is getting smaller and smaller, and that’s something that concerns us,” said Killorn.
It can also impact government budgets, for departments which use heavy vehicles like snow clearing or garbage pickup, even when contracted out those costs will come back to the taxpayer.
McTeague said, as long as oil prices remain where they are now it’ll continue to put upward pressure on fuel prices.
Now the rising cost of diesel might not be obvious to you, unless you drive a diesel vehicle yourself, but because the fuel plays such a large role in the production of goods and the transportation of good, we do feel it in downstream cost hikes.
( Link to story https://atlantic.ctvnews.ca/high-diesel-prices-impacting-costs-across-the-maritimes-1.6515862 )
