South Carolina Gas Prices Near $3.90 as Crude Tops $100

What happened

South Carolina drivers got hit with one of the sharpest weekly gas-price jumps the state has seen in months. GasBuddy's survey of roughly 3,000 stations put the statewide average at $3.88 a gallon on Monday, up 16.6 cents from the previous week, 27.4 cents from a month earlier, and $1.11 higher than a year ago 1812. Local outlets in Charleston, Greenville and elsewhere all ran with the same GasBuddy numbers, noting metro-level swings that were often even steeper: Columbia at $3.85 (up 17.5 cents), Spartanburg at $3.86 (up 18.8 cents), and the Augusta-area market at $3.93 (up a comparatively modest 9.8 cents) 18. Station-level prices ranged wildly, from $3.09 to $5.09 a gallon within the state 1.

AAA's competing daily survey tells a consistent but not identical story. It listed South Carolina's average at $3.9323 as of September 12, up from $3.7613 a week earlier — a roughly 17-cent jump — and South Carolina Public Radio cited an AAA figure just above $3.92, about 15 cents higher than the prior week 1011. WSPA's follow-up reporting, citing an AAA spokesperson, described an even more sudden move: a 9-cent overnight jump in the state average, with prices up 12 cents from the week before and 30 cents from a month earlier 9. None of these figures are contradictory so much as they reflect different survey days and methodologies layered on top of a genuinely fast-moving market.

The increase is not confined to South Carolina. GasBuddy reported the U.S. average climbing 17.2 cents in a week to $4.25, with diesel up 31.6 cents to $6.18 12. AAA's national figures ran slightly higher, at $4.27 to $4.31 depending on the exact date of the report 51013. Diesel in South Carolina hit a state record around $5.89 to $5.98 a gallon, according to AAA-based reporting and public radio coverage 1011. Even with the spike, South Carolina remained one of the cheaper states to fill up, sitting among AAA's ten least expensive gasoline markets alongside Indiana, Mississippi and Texas 13.

Why crude oil is driving this, not natural gas

The mechanism behind the jump is crude oil, which the Energy Information Administration identifies as the single largest component of the retail gasoline price — about 51.4% in 2025, dwarfing refining, distribution, marketing and tax costs combined 14. Crude climbed as fighting intensified around the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint through which a large share of the world's oil and LNG moves. NPR reported crude pushing back above $100 a barrel for the first time since July 15, while EIA's own daily price data for September 10 showed WTI at $103.57 and Brent at $120.98 16. CNN's numbers for the prior settlement were somewhat lower — Brent at $101.21 and U.S. crude at $96.05 — a discrepancy that likely reflects how fast prices moved within the same 24-to-48-hour window rather than any real conflict between the two accounts 17. CNN also detailed the immediate triggers: U.S. strikes on Iranian oil tankers, a Houthi attack on Saudi Arabia, and fears that the conflict was broadening across the region's oil infrastructure 17.

GasBuddy's Patrick De Haan attributed the pump increase to a similar cluster of causes — tensions involving Iran, Red Sea attacks, and refinery outages in Russia — and warned drivers to expect continued volatility 18. AAA's South Carolina spokesperson, quoted by WSPA, flagged something else worth noting: the timing is unusual. Gasoline demand typically drops after Labor Day as the summer driving season ends, yet prices rose anyway because crude oil supply concerns overwhelmed the seasonal demand slump 9. RVBusiness's write-up of AAA's national data corroborates that demand actually fell — from 8.92 million to 8.55 million barrels per day — even as prices climbed, reinforcing that this is a supply-and-geopolitics story, not a demand story 13.

EIA's own forecasting shows how quickly the outlook can shift. As of the September update reported by CNN, the agency raised its 2026 Brent forecast to $91 a barrel and its 2027 forecast to $74, both up from the prior month's projections of $87 and $69, while pushing its estimate of when Middle Eastern oil flows normalize further into next year 17.

Where natural gas and data centers fit — and where they don't

Natural gas is part of the wider energy backdrop but is not what pushed gasoline prices up this week. Gasoline is refined from crude oil; natural gas serves a different set of markets, chiefly electricity generation, heating and industrial use. South Carolina's own residential natural gas rate was $27.35 per thousand cubic feet in May 2026, up 2.7% from April, while its commercial rate fell 6.8% to $13.78 — real utility costs, but not connected to what drivers pay at the pump 18.

Where natural gas does matter is in the slower-moving story of electricity demand. Reuters reported that the EIA expects U.S. power consumption to climb from a record 4,195 billion kilowatt-hours in 2025 to 4,244 billion in 2026 and 4,381 billion in 2027, driven substantially by AI and cryptocurrency data centers, with gas-fired generation holding around 40% of the mix 19. A separate EIA analysis covered by Natural Gas Intelligence found that a high-growth data-center scenario could push gas-fired generation up 7.3% between 2025 and 2027 — more than four times the 1.7% baseline increase — and could add 3 to 20 billion cubic feet per day of gas demand by 2030, raising delivered gas prices to power generators by roughly 50 cents per million British thermal units above baseline projections 20. That is a real and growing pressure on electricity and gas markets, but it operates on a multi-year timescale tied to data-center buildout, not the week-to-week churn of oil geopolitics that just moved South Carolina's pump prices.

Where the reporting agrees

Every outlet covering South Carolina specifically converges on the same basic shape: a roughly 16-to-17-cent weekly jump pushing the state average to somewhere between $3.88 and $3.93, tied to crude oil's move back above $100 a barrel amid Middle East conflict 189101112. National coverage from AAA, RVBusiness, NPR and CNN agrees that this is fundamentally a crude-oil story rooted in Strait of Hormuz instability, not a domestic refining or demand issue 5131517. There is also broad agreement that South Carolina, despite the spike, remains cheaper than most of the country 1113.

Where it doesn't

The clearest divergence is in the exact dollar figures, which differ by survey and by day. GasBuddy's Monday statewide read of $3.88 sits close to but not identical with AAA's Saturday figure of $3.9323, and WSPA's separate report describing a 9-cent overnight jump adds yet another data point that doesn't map cleanly onto either 1910. These aren't really contradictions — GasBuddy and AAA sample different station sets on different days — but readers comparing headlines across outlets will see numbers that don't quite match.

Framing differs more than facts. GasBuddy-sourced coverage treats this as a sudden, localized shock; AAA and public-radio coverage lean into the diesel-record and seasonal-reversal angle; national outlets like CNN and NPR treat it as an inflation and oil-market story with South Carolina as a minor data point rather than the center of it 111517. The data-center and natural-gas material, drawn from EIA, Reuters and Natural Gas Intelligence, appears nowhere in the South Carolina-specific gas price coverage — it's a separate, longer-horizon thread that only connects to this week's story through the shared fact that energy markets broadly are under strain 1920.

The evidence supports treating this as a straightforward, well-corroborated crude-oil supply shock. The state and national figures, though not perfectly aligned, tell the same story from multiple independent surveys, and every source citing a cause points to the same geopolitical flashpoint around Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. Natural gas and data-center demand are real and rising pressures on the region's energy system, but nothing in the reporting suggests they had anything to do with why South Carolina drivers paid roughly 17 cents more per gallon this particular week.