Gas

Gas pains have hit Chesapeake Bay anglers like a plate of bad oysters. Anglers filling their boats this spring watch mesmerized as dials and digital readouts at gas pumps blink and spin to amounts equal to the gross national product of small nations. A year ago, regular gas was $1.75 a gallon and diesel was $1.72, according to AAA. Now, I'm afraid to type a price on Friday for fear it will be ancient history by the time you read this. The perky American Petroleum Institute (you'd be perky, too, if your middle name was petroleum)

Gas for under $2? Put it down as too good to last. AAA Mid-Atlantic reported Sunday that the average price of a gallon of regular-grade gasoline in Maryland has risen above two bucks after four months below that level. After bottoming out at about $1.70 in January, the Maryland average rose to $2.03 Sunday, according to AAA. Sub-$2 gasoline lingered at some low-cost, mostly rural stations, but most in the Baltimore area appeared to have breached that barrier over the weekend. The consolation is that gas prices remain far below their levels of a year ago, when the Maryland average stood at $3.26.

IT'S THE START of the weekend and I am gassing my car at a Shell station in Baltimore County, where the prices on the signboard would make your heart seize up. Regular unleaded is going for $1.759 a gallon. The mid-grade stuff is $1.839. Premium is an incredible $1.919. Normally, the only way you'd fork over this kind of dough for gas is if someone with a bandanna over his face were holding a gun to your chest. But here in the spring of 2004, with U.S. soldiers in Iraq and the war on terrorism looking like it sure won't be ending anytime soon, no one seems to mind that we're paying record high prices at the pumps.

Maryland undoubtedly needs more and cheaper energy, but we're not going to do just anything to get it. We won't strip state forests for fireplace fodder. We won't reverse pollution controls on cars and power plants. And we shouldn't let ships carrying liquefied natural gas sail into the mouth of the Patapsco River. Importing small but potentially catastrophic industrial risks into highly populated areas may have been OK for the 20th-century economy. It doesn't work now. With hundreds of miles of coastline to accommodate freighters bringing gas from the Caribbean, why choose one of the few spots where an accident or terrorist attack could do grave damage?

At the Shell station where I sometimes buy gas, a gallon of regular unleaded was going for $2.98 the other day, and it felt like a bargain. Two-ninety-eight?! I was giddy. Down the road, they were charging $3.05 and $3.07 and other prices you usually couldn't get without holding a knife to someone's throat. So seeing $2.98, it was all I could do not to break out the champagne and confetti right there at pump 4. Oh, yes, I wanted to crank up a Van Morrison CD and wave over the guy at pump 2 and the woman at pump 3 with the crazy hair and start the party, because $2.98 was probably the best we were going to do for the rest of our lives.

ON WEDNESDAY, the first day of December, I finally turned on the furnace. Holding out this long - or "cheaping out," as a family member who has been wearing blankets calls it - was a record, a personal best. Some years, I have lasted until late in November, maybe a day or two before Thanksgiving, before giving in and switching on the heat. But this year, the milestone day, Thanksgiving, came and went, and the furnace remained silent. Studying my latest utility bill, I saw that between mid-October and mid-November, I used a mere 37 therms of natural gas or $31.56.

What do you do if you run out of gas in the middle of the Harbor Tunnel? This was the question posed to me by a Sun colleague, photographer Barbara Haddock-Taylor, who came distressingly close to experiencing that particular public humiliation. Fortunately, she had just enough fumes to make it to a gas station. More generally, what do you do when dismal automotive events occur at the worst possible places? Let us define "worst possible places" as busy traffic bottlenecks where a lack of shoulder space gives any motorist the potential to become a one-person traffic jam -- not to mention a serious hazard to oneself and others.

Gas leaked into the air and two manhole covers popped loose after a natural gas main that runs beneath the heart of downtown Baltimore ruptured in two places yesterday - forcing the closure of major thoroughfares during the afternoon and evening rush hour and causing a major headache for commuters. The closed streets - Lombard and Charles - partially reopened last night. But some lanes will remained blocked this morning as BGE crews make repairs, officials said, raising the prospect of another problematic rush hour.

With natural gas prices high and supplies tight, a group of California utilities has purchased part of a prolific Wyoming gas field from Denver investor Philip Anschutz. The Southern California power companies paid $300 million to Anschutz Pinedale Corp. for 38 oil and gas wells on 1,800 acres of the Pinedale Anticline, a fast-developing natural gas field in southwest Wyoming. The purchase - rare, but not unheard of - suggests a potential trend of utilities buying gas production to lock in supplies and prices, energy analysts said.

OIL, GAS AND other forms of liquid energy aren't the only things that will be vacuuming money from your purse in coming weeks. Because much of the Mid-Atlantic's supply of natural gas is piped from offshore wells on the Gulf of Mexico, damage from Hurricane Katrina makes it likely that Maryland' s 1 million natural gas customers will see hefty price increases for winter heating. Industry officials expect bills to rise even beyond the 20 percent to 30 percent they had already been predicting.