Gas Buddy market expert Patrick De Haan joined 11Alive on Thursday morning to detail the gas price impacts being felt already in metro Atlanta from Mideast conflict.
ATLANTA — Georgia is reportedly one of the foremost states feeling the first effects of a gas price surge that’s come amid the war with Iran.
Patrick De Haan, a market expert with Gas Buddy, posted on Wednesday on his Substack that Georgia is the No. 3 state with the largest weekly gas price rise — a 32.6 cent average increase since last week. Only Oklahoma (33.2 cents) and Wisconsin (38.8 cents) saw higher jumps.
On Thursday morning, De Haan joined 11Alive’s Dan Kennedy for an interview about the gas price situation in Georgia and more broadly in the U.S. as the Mideast conflict severely disrupts oil markets.
Georgia and Atlanta gas prices – how we may already have seen prices peaking for now
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De Haan told 11Alive that right now in Atlanta it “doesn’t look real good” with the average price up 41 cents a gallon since last week. He said the overall price is back up to about $3.20 a gallon, 22 cents higher than a year ago and the highest level since 2024.
But there may be a silver lining, at least for now. He explained that Georgia may just be ahead of the curve, and that the price surge may plateau a bit from here — while other states have yet to see their own surge as significantly.
“A lot of us think of the increase as kind of a race — some people cross the finish line earlier, some people later, there are laggards. There’s not really a uniform way to see these prices go up, Georgia has a very heavy reliance on the Colonial Pipeline which is a massive pipeline that flows up the Southeast into the Eastern Seaboard, so you are very quick at seeing prices funnel down with such a major piece of infrastructure.
“Having said that, with prices having gone up so significantly in Atlanta over the last week, you may be nearing the finish line in terms of the increases, based on where the market is now. And the rest of the country, or at least some of the country, is still lagging behind.”
So, for Atlanta, the “worst of it” may be over for now.
The Strait of Hormuz and the problem that could stretch into the medium- or near-term future
De Haan outlined that there’s basically a supply problem created by the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, the critical passageway from the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea and then Indian Ocean, carrying Middle Eastern oil to markets all over the world.
It’s a small stretch of water between the tip of Oman in eastern Arabia to southern Iran, only about 20 miles wide at its thinnest point. And the threat of Iranian attack drones, being used in retaliation on targets throughout the region, has effectively closed the strait.
“The Strait of Hormuz carries 20 to 25 million barrels of oil per day, that’s 20% of the global volume being consumed,” De Haan said. “That’s just a huge kink in the hose, not eve oil from the (U.S.) Strategic Petroleum Reserve would really do much to be able to replace the oil lost through the effect that many ships are now not moving through the strait.”
Why you can’t just replace the oil supply and how “time is the enemy”
The problem, De Haan said, with just tapping into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve — which reportedly is not yet being considered — is that it “really pales in comparison to the amount of oil supply being lost through the Strait of Hormuz.”
While the Department of Energy calls it the “world’s largest supply of emergency crude oil,” with about 402 million barrels as of August 2025, it takes only a few weeks of losing that 20-25 million barrels a day in the Middle East to overcome the market impact you could soften even if you were to use the entire reserve.
“What’s lost in the Middle East can’t necessarily easily be made up by the SPR,” De Haan said.
Meanwhile, he said that time is not on our side in terms of blunting the rise of gas prices.
“This problem is compounding itself every day in a significant way. We can’t make up for lost time, every day that we see 20 million barrels not flowing through the strait is another day we’re gonna have to catch up, it could take at this point weeks or months to get this oil to where it needs to go and you can’t just suddenly build ships overnight that carry excess crude,” De Haan said. “Time is really the enemy here.”
He noted a pledge by President Trump to escort oil tankers faces logistical problems from Iran’s drones “that could just fly in, and there’s so many of them” to the point where escorts “can’t completely remove the risk.”
“So I don’t see a whole lot of good options here,” De Haan said.
Any good news?
De Haan believes the price pressure will spur action, and while the national average is currently at $3.25 a gallon he doesn’t think we’ll go as high as $4 a gallon, pegging his estimate on Thursday at $3.40 or $3.50.
“There’s going to be a tremendous amount of pressure to figure this problem out,” he said.
The full interview with De Haan is available in the video player above this story.
