Via: Boston.com

New Englanders struggling this summer to pay gas prices topping $4 a gallon should brace for more bad news — home heating oil costs next winter are expected to hit record highs.

One retail heating oil dealer says she expects a typical household delivery that cost $500 last winter will climb to at least $850 this winter.

“It’s going to be staggering,” said Northboro Oil Co. owner Sandra Farrell in telephone interview with The Associated Press. “It’s going to be a real problem going into this winter for everyone unless something changes.”

Farrell, whose family has owned and operated the Northborough, Mass., business since 1953, said some dealers are talking about prices in the $4.89 per gallon range for the coming winter, about $2 more per gallon than last winter. An average household usually needs four deliveries from December to March, she said.

Record-high crude oil prices have sent gasoline costs soaring this year. The National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association, which represents state-run low income energy assistance programs, recently predicted that home heating oil costs will hit record levels this winter.

The group said the national average cost to heat a home with oil this winter will be $2,593, up from $1,962 last winter. Families in cold-weather Northeast states will be hit even harder.

About 40 percent of Massachusetts homes use oil heat. More than 963,000 households in the state use home heating oil which is delivered by more than 800 distributors, many of them small businesses. In Maine, one of the nation’s coldest states, four out of five households heat with oil.

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