A confluence of soaring demand and treacherous delivery conditions is straining the home heating oil market in Westmoreland County during this month’s bitter cold.
“The demand for fuel (heating oil) is extremely high for several reasons. They (furnaces) have been running nonstop,” said Kristen Zawoyski, general manager of Export Fuel Co. of Salem.
The demand for home heating oil in Westmoreland County is coming from about 17,500 residences that use the fuel, according to 2024 data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Also known as fuel oil, it is made from refining crude oil, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Delivery has been made more difficult because of a combination of factors, said Jeff Cole, operations manager for Luther P. Miller Inc., a Ligonier Township company.
In some cases, the snowstorm at the beginning of February made it impossible to deliver to customers if their driveways were not cleared of snow and “they live off the beaten path,” Cole said.
“We can’t afford to get a truck stuck in a driveway,” Zawoyski said.
Many of their customers are elderly and are not able to shovel or plow their driveways, Zawoyski said.
Even if the drivers are able to get to a house, they have to lug a 60-pound hose through deep snow to the homeowner’s fuel tank, Cole said. That has led to driver fatigue.
“There were hiccups everywhere,” Cole said.
In a typical winter, Zawoyski said they are able to fill an order for fuel made on Monday by the following day. Now, customers might have to wait for four to seven days, she noted.
And when they do get a call to resupply someone’s fuel oil, “every call is an emergency,” Zawoyski said.
Zawoyski said some customers did not believe weather forecasts predicting a snowstorm and bitter temperatures would be as bad as they turned out to be.
Supply chain OK
Getting supplies of home heating oil from wholesalers has not been a problem, other than driving the trucks over snow-covered roads to terminals in Salem. The local terminal is operated by Energy Transfer, complemented by a terminal in the Altoona area, Cole said. Those terminals are supplied by pipelines.
Zawoyski agreed that there is plenty of home heating fuel for customers.
In the face of demand, Zawoyski said that the price per gallon has increased twice this month, rising to about $3.59 a gallon for deliveries between 150 gallons and 299 gallons. Even with the increase of 30 cents a gallon this heating season, the cost is less than it was a few years ago, when prices were around $4 a gallon, she said.
The average price of home heating oil in Pennsylvania was $3.83 per gallon as of the first week of February, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That was about a 24-cent-a-gallon increase from the end of January and 17 cents higher than the first week of February 2025, according to government data.
The Energy Information Administration reports the U.S. supply of heating oil is greater than the demand. The government calculates that the demand for home heating oil is 4.3 million barrels per day, about 500 million barrels a day less than the supply of 4.81 million barrels at the end of January.
‘A nightmare’
The average temperature for November, December and January this winter was 31.9 degrees, compared to 36.1 degrees for the same months last winter, according to Matt Brudy, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Moon. Typically, temperatures for the first three months of winter in western Pennsylvania are 35.1 degrees, Brudy said.
When air temperatures hovered around zero degrees, wind chill temperatures were around 20 degrees below zero, Brudy said.
“The conditions have worked against everybody — for us and the homeowners. It’s just been a nightmare,” Zawoyski said.
