Region to face surging gas costs but supply 'in good shape'

New Englanders heading out for Labor Day weekend will find gasoline prices soaring past $3 a gallon. But unlike some parts of the United States, they'll at least have gas to buy.

As energy markets continued to be ravaged by fallout from Hurricane Katrina's devastation of the Gulf Coast oil producing and refining region, governors in Georgia and the Carolinas yesterday urged citizens to stay home for the weekend to conserve disappearing fuel supplies. In Atlanta and cities closer to the Gulf, scores of gas stations ran dry. Midwest pump prices jumped by 50 cents in two days.

Locally, gasoline prices are rising too fast for market watchers like the American Automobile Association and the Oil Price Information Service to make accurate daily surveys.

AAA posted a Massachusetts average of $2.71 a gallon yesterday, up 8 cents from a day earlier. But spokesman Art Kinsman noted the survey is based on credit card transactions through midnight Wednesday, and almost certainly lagged several cents behind actual prices that stations are raising daily or even every few hours. ''We're just in an unprecedented situation with how sharply and how rapidly prices are going up," Kinsman said.

As of late yesterday, GasBuddy.com, an online comparison shopping site, showed 15 stations in Greater Boston charging over $3.30 a gallon, and a dozen charging 75 cents a gallon less.

But if the price is painful, the good news is that ''we're in pretty good shape with gasoline supplies," said David L. O'Connor, the Massachusetts commissioner of energy resources. As of yesterday, New England had 5.1 million barrels of gasoline in storage, about 300,000 more than the same time a year ago, O'Connor said.

''There's certainly no indication at this point that we're going to have any supply disruption here," said Stephen C. Dodge of the Massachusetts Petroleum Council, which represents gasoline, diesel, and heating oil retailers.

On the New York Mercantile Exchange, wholesale gasoline prices rose to $2.40 a gallon for October delivery, up 6.4 percent for the day and more than double levels of a year ago. Some speculators paid $2.92 a gallon for contracts to deliver gas this month, the highest price in over 21 years of wholesale trading.

Swamping refineries and shutting down their power supplies indefinitely, Katrina took down an estimated 10 to 12 percent of US gasoline production capacity.

But the crisis illustrated a rare silver lining in New England's usually weak energy position. Sitting at the far end of US oil and gas production and distribution, the region generally pays among the highest prices. But by necessity, New England also has developed supply lines through pipelines and tankers from Canada, Venezuela, and other non-US sources that deliver more than half of its petroleum and natural gas.

That leaves Boston now in a better position than areas like Atlanta and midwestern cities that depend far more on the Gulf for what is, barring a calamity like Katrina, usually cheaper gas. ''One of the things we probably buy with our higher prices is more resiliency in the system," O'Connor said.

In one of only a few signs of progress to restore the Gulf energy infrastructure, the owner of a major Houston-Louisiana-New York pipeline said yesterday it had restored 25 to 35 percent of normal capacity. The company, Colonial Pipeline Co. of Alpharetta, Ga., said it hoped to get flow up to 60 percent by this weekend.

Travel industry officials expected many Americans to curtail Labor Day driving plans, either because of the soaring cost of gasoline or the fear of not being able to fill up their tank for the ride home. With President Bush counseling Americans ''Don't buy gas if you don't need it," governors of three Southern states and Pennsylvania also called for voluntary conservation to help stretch tight supplies.

Some coastal resorts in Myrtle Beach and Hilton Head, S.C., reported a handful of cancellations. Lucius Monroe, an Atlanta retiree, canceled a road trip to Mount Rushmore and Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming after gas hit $4 in his neighborhood and filling station lines stretched around the block. ''We don't want to get caught out there trying to get gas," Monroe told a reporter.

But tourism industry officials in popular New England destinations said they weren't seeing anything similar. Wendy Northcross, the chief executive of the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce, said she had not heard of any ''dramatic shift," of either people canceling reservations this weekend because of high gas prices or vacationers booking last-minute trips to the Cape after canceling longer, more expensive trips.

Northcross said she suspects already-high gasoline prices affected Cape tourism earlier in the summer. Traffic over the two bridges dropped 2 percent in July from a year earlier. Anecdotally, restaurants and midpriced resorts have reported a tough summer, Northcross said. ''We're probably seeing fewer day-trippers than we have in the past."

In Maine, ''It's looking like a pretty good weekend," said Greg Dugal, the executive director of the Maine Innkeepers Association, which represents 600 resort, hotel, and motel owners. ''If you had a vacation planned for this weekend, I don't think anyone won't go even if gas is $4 a gallon. I do think people will spend less money on other things because they're spending it on gas, but they won't cancel a trip."

Peter J. Howe can be reached at howe@globe.com. Material from Globe wire services was used in this report.