Local gas prices should begin coming down again sometime next week following Monday’s sharp jump from $1.19.9 to $1.29.9 a litre for regular, says a senior petroleum analyst.

Dan McTeague, with GasBuddy.com, said Tuesday the recent upward trend in prices was the product of problems with the supply chain in the midwest U.S., not in Canada.

While the Alberta forest fires didn’t help matters with Suncor, it was the situation in the U.S. midwest that drove up the prices, he said.

As the supply chain gets back to normal following unforeseen issues with two major refineries and a couple of pipelines over the last month, McTeague said, the market price will begin to fall. It’s already happening in a big way.

Gas prices in western Canada are tied directly to the Chicago futures gasoline spot market, he explained.

“All of the gasoline prices from the B.C. coast to you guys, to Yellowknife and Thunder Bay (Ont.), all follow the Chicago future spot market.”

McTeague said the supply issues in the midwest began earlier this spring and pushed up the Chicago price from $1.55 US for a U.S. gallon on May 9 to $2.12 a gallon by Tuesday and Wednesday of last week.

But the supply woes have corrected themselves, and the Chicago price has plummeted since last week, he pointed out.

Tuesday morning, the Chicago price had already fallen 15 cents a gallon, down to $1.97 US, but it’s dropped another 27 cents overnight to $1.69 today, he pointed out in a second interview with the Star this morning.

McTeague said he can’t see the $1.29 Whitehorse price holding up for very long. He suspects prices will begin to fall back to $1.19 or below by next week.

There’s a lag time between the North and the South, so while the North is the last to see increases, it’s also the last to see the decreases, he said.

Statistics available from the Yukon Bureau of Statistics show Whitehorse began the year with the lowest gasoline prices in seven years.

Regular gas was selling at an average of $0.92 cents a litre through February, when the commodity price for a barrel of oil was hovering below $30 US.

This morning, the barrel was trading at $48.48, still well below the 2008 peak price for oil in the last 10 years.

A barrel was selling for more than $150 and Whitehorse motorists paid an average of $1.45 per litre in July of that year.

The lowest price for gas in Whitehorse over the last decade was recorded in January 2009, when regular was selling for an average of $0.85.