Today is Saturday, June 18th. Gas prices have been rising for two months straight.

Now on average, a tank of gas costs more than $5 nationwide.

To try to bring prices back down, an organization of the world's biggest oil producers, OPEC Plus,

has promised to increase production. And here in the U.S., the federal government has been

releasing a million barrels of oil a day from its gas reserves. So, why are prices still high?

Today, we'll hear from trusted and well-known expert Patrick DeHon.

He's the head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, and has been tracking gas markets for nearly two

decades. Patrick is breaking down step-by-step how we got here, and revealing insights into the oil

market that you don't often hear about. Welcome, welcome to The Newsworthy Special Edition Saturday,

when we sit down with a different expert or celebrity every Saturday to talk about something in

the news. Don't forget to tune in every Monday through Friday for our regular episodes,

where we provide all the day's news in 10 minutes. I'm Erica Mandy, it's now time for today's

Special Edition Saturday. Patrick, thank you for coming on The Newsworthy.

Thanks for having me. So first, can you help explain how we got here? What are the key reasons

that gas is so expensive right now? Really, all of it started with COVID, with Americans changing

their driving habits essentially overnight, which caused gasoline consumption in the U.S.

to plummet, along with diesel and jet fuel consumption, as Plains sat on tarmacs.

We saw a huge decline in overall petroleum consumption, which caused oil prices to collapse

essentially, which caused oil companies then to stop producing, something that wasn't being

consumed. Oil companies greatly scaled back production, refineries in some cases shut down

permanently because of the negative outlook. Fast forward to 2021 and demand started to recover

as the economy reopened, and OPEC didn't increase production until July of last year.

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