Ben Lowry: My advice on home heating oil is to wear pullovers now and use as little of it as you can and hope prices dip in the summer
It took days for some media to grasp the scale of the oil price rise.
(Click here to read Ben Lowry’s main column: ‘When Iranians danced for joy in Belfast at the fall of Ayatollah Khamenei, there was barely any media or public interest in such scenes’)
Home heating oil began to rise on Sunday, and by Monday night – when we were finalising Tuesday’s front page – we had examples of suppliers that had been charging as little as £519 for 900 litres the week before, but were now charging £819.
Yet BBC national news as late as Tuesday night had a correspondent saying they had heard of reports of 30% or 40% increases in NI. It was 60% 24 hours earlier!
Now prices are almost double where they were, at £1,000 for 900 litres, and at the levels they were in the weeks after the Russian invasion – an eye watering £1 per litre or more.
I have been monitoring and writing about oil prices in Northern Ireland the four years since President Putin launched war. Such costs are very relevant to us, because the province uses home heating oil more than any other area in Britain and Ireland – a majority of households. In England it is less than 5% of them.
My uneasy advice at the moment is that if you have enough oil to get through to the summer, throw on pullovers and use as little oil as you can until then. The Russian precedent suggests prices will fall back below £1 a litre within weeks. But I say that hesitantly because the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is very serious and did not happen in 2022, or after the Hamas attack on Israel the following year.
• Ben Lowry (@Benlowry2) is News Letter editor