Key diesel benchmark price holds steady

But that price stability comes after a recently volatile futures market

After two weeks of trading in the futures market during which the price of ultra low sulfur diesel shot higher before sliding back down, the benchmark retail diesel price did much the same, coming in unchanged this week.

The Department of Energy/Energy Information Administration average weekly retail diesel price effective Monday was $4.109 a gallon, the same price as last week. It’s the second time since July that the price has not moved.

The stability stands in sharp contrast to what happened last week, when the price at the pump, according to the DOE, was up 21 cents a gallon from the prior week, a large gain but only the sixth-biggest one-week jump since the Russian invasion of Ukraine two years ago.

The stability is ironic because underneath that lack of movement is a great deal of movement in the ultra low sulfur diesel price but in an up-and-down direction that has brought that benchmark price to a level it was at about two weeks ago.

On Feb. 5, ULSD on the CME commodity exchange settled at $2.7248 a gallon, marking a gain of 6.48 cents from the prior week’s close.

From there, it moved up to $2.9642 a gallon in just four days before beginning a move down, interspersed with some daily increases in the slide, that brought the settlement Tuesday to $2.7315 a gallon, a one-day drop of 7.51 cents.

News stories that appeared extremely bullish just 10 days ago seem to have faded from the market’s memory. The diversion of crude and oil products away from the Red Sea and the Suez Canal is firmly under way, yet the trends in markets have been downward.