Some refineries out west had production problems last month. The Big Power Outage helped the gas prices go up also. Lots of people demanded gas for generators.
rrfield
p.s. The Big Power Outage is believed to have started with some transmittion lines that were overloaded in Ohio, which isn't normally something that would cause the grid to fail....but... then the relay's that notify system control of problems, well they failed. No one knew there was a problem till it was too late.