The price of home heating oil in Pennsylvania passed $6 this month, meaning households will need to pay nearly double what they paid this time last year to fill their tanks ahead of cold weather.
In an attempt to ease prices, the Trump administration plans to provide 315,000 barrels from the Northeast Home Heating Oil Reserve next month. But energy analysts and experts say this amount is likely not enough to push prices down in a significant or lasting way.
"That's about a day's [worth of] consumption in the peak of the winter," said William O'Neil, a principal analyst at S&P Global Energy. "That extra supply would certainly help, but it's just a drop in the bucket."
Roughly 685,000, or 13%, of households in Pennsylvania use heating oil or kerosene to heat their homes, according to American Community Survey data. Close to 7% of households in Delaware and just over 5% of households in New Jersey use heating oil or kerosene.
The skyrocketing price of home heating oil is tied to the price of diesel, which has risen in response to disruptions to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz near Iran and attacks on oil refineries in the Middle East and Russia, O'Neil said. The $6 per gallon price of heating oil in Pennsylvania is the highest it's been since at least 1990, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
"It's just going to be a tremendous hardship," said Jamie Van Nostrand, a fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Kleinman Center for Energy Policy and policy director at the national nonprofitFuture of Heat Initiative.
The Department of Energy will auction off oil from the reserve from terminals in Maine, Massachusetts and Connecticut. Suppliers borrowing oil from the reserve must return it, plus a premium, by next winter.
Pennsylvania suppliers could purchase this oil directly or could benefit indirectly from lower prices due to the additional supply entering the regional market, said Seth Blumsack, a professor of energy policy and economics at Penn State University. Either way, Blumsack said that the relatively small amount of oil being released means the effect on prices will be minimal.
"It might help a little bit," he said. "[But] that in and of itself is probably not going to be the cure for high home heating bills this winter."
O'Neil said the only way to bring diesel and home heating oil prices back down is to recover the supply that's been lost from the Middle East and Russia.
"Anything else is virtually a Band-Aid," he said.
Pennsylvania households struggling to pay for heating oil can apply for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance program starting Nov. 2.
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