Gas prices drop; $3 a gallon spotted in Cobb

Remember when gas was under $3 a gallon?

Maybe you don’t, but some folks in Marietta were catching a break Friday morning.

On Friday morning, a Citgo station at 3009 Canton Road in Marietta, near Shaw Road, was selling regular unleaded for $2.99 a gallon. The station was reporting that the gas would go at that rate until 10 a.m. Online price-watcher GasBuddy.com reported a gallon of regular unleaded at $2.98 Thursday evening at a Marathon station at 2380 Peachtree Industrial Blvd., near Shadburn Ferry Road.

Across metro Atlanta, gas prices appeared to be dropping steadily. GasBuddy.com listed the local price snapshot at $3.61 in Atlanta — down from $3.63 Thursday and $4 a week earlier.

Most gas pumps are full of regular and filling up doesn’t cost as much. Premium is still precious, but traffic is no longer a pack of annoyed gas hunters; it’s back to just being annoying.

So what happened? Demand has decreased as drivers came to understand they could fill their tanks again, and supply has increased as refineries come back online and pipelines deliver at near-capacity levels. Some stations, independents especially, might still be out, but probably not for long.

“We flooded the system with regular. It’s more important. Premium is coming in,” said Tex Pitfield, president and chief executive of fuel distributor Saraguay Petroleum Corp. “We’re in pretty good shape; we’re not out of the woods.”

What’s next? A continuing drop in gas prices — though not to levels as low as those in the rest of the country.

The nationwide price drop follows a 40 percent decline in the price of crude oil since it hit a record $147.27 per barrel on July 11. The per-barrel price hovered around $89 Thursday.