U.S. retail gasoline prices continued to fall Wednesday, while oil and gasoline futures jumped after a government report showed a surprising decline in U.S. gasoline inventories. Retail gasoline prices fell another 0.9 cent overnight to a national average of $3.031 a gallon (3.8 liters), according to the AAA car association and the Oil Price Information Service. Retail prices, which usually lag behind the futures market, have fallen since the weekend after having been driven higher by U.S. refinery outages. Gasoline prices peaked at $3.227 a gallon in late May. Meanwhile, gasoline for August delivery rose 4.56 cents to $2.146 a gallon in mid-day trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange after rising as much as 5.38 cents earlier in the session. Light sweet crude for August delivery rose 88 cents to $74.90 a barrel after surpassing $75 earlier. The last time a front-month contract closed over $75 was last August. The market was responding to the weekly petroleum inventory report from the Energy Department, which showed gasoline supplies dropping by 2.3 million barrels last week. Analysts had expected an increase of 560,000 barrels. Demand for gasoline grew 1.3 percent from a year earlier. Gasoline imports fell by 508,000 barrels per day (bpd) to an average of 915,000 bpd last week. Gasoline production fell by 64,000 bpd to 9.2 million bpd. The report also said U.S. refinery utilization rates rose 0.8 percent to 91 percent. Analysts expected a rise of 0.5 percent. Crude-oil inventories fell by 500,000 barrels last week, less than the 760,000-barrel decrease expected by analysts. Imports of crude oil grew by 350,000 bpd to an average of 10.4 million bpd.
