Westlake’s Joe Schaefer stood outside the Circle K Marathon gas station June 29 filling up his Mercury minivan. Though he had a quarter-full tank when he started, at $2.81 a gallon, the married father of three laid out $50 before the tank was full.

The Schaefers have a slightly smaller car, a Toyota Rav4, that Joe drives an average of 200 miles weekly to and from work. His wife mainly uses the larger minivan to commute to her job in Lakewood.

According to AAA, Ohio’s average gas price is about 72 cents higher than a year ago, and drivers such as Schaefer have no other choice than to pay the increase, now inching over $3 a gallon at some stations.

“As active as our kids are, there’s not a whole lot you can do,” Schaefer said. “I’d like to say we cut back, but it’s not an option.”

However, his son will attend Holy Name High School in Parma Heights this fall, creating one more daily trip. Schaefer and other neighbors with children at the same school plan to take turns carpooling the students back and forth in an effort to share the cost.

National City Corp. Economist Ryan Reed doesn’t have any pat solutions to rising gas costs either, but he does have some explanations. Reed spoke to the Rocky River Chamber of Commerce June 22 on the issue.

Many have speculated that gas prices are increasing because the world is running out of petroleum. Reed said that may be part of the problem, but not all of it.

“Yes, we are running out of oil in that it’s a finite resource and it’s not renewable,” Reed said.

But several other factors are a part of the gasoline price hikes over the past few years, he explained.

Though the United States holds just 4.5 percent of the world’s population, its citizens are responsible for 25 percent of the world’s oil use. That breaks down to about 21 million barrels a day.

China, the world’s second largest user, consumes 6.5 million barrels a day.

In addition to being the second largest user in the world, China is joining Brazil, India and Russia in their growing petroleum demands — consumption in those countries has steadily increased over the past two years.

The trend in the oil industry has always been that when consumption rises above production, petroleum prices go up and, in the opposite situation, prices dip.

Reed said producers weren’t very well equipped to deal with the initial increase in demand from so many countries, but things have since turned around.

However, the once-standard pricing trend has completely changed.

“In 2004, as production rises above consumption, prices continue to escalate,” Reed said.

His explanation is that “production companies are now paying more attention to world events than supply and demand.”

Iraq, Iran and Saudia Arabia are three of the world’s largest oil producers.

There’s a war in Iraq and Iran says it wants to enrich uranium in order to begin an atomic power program, while Western countries worry that it’s trying to build a nuclear weapon.

Last year, Hurricane Katrina hit the U.S. Gulf Coast. Events such as these are having a real impact on gas prices, Reed said.

While individuals such as Schaefer are doing what they can to keep up with the costs of gasoline at home, Reed is concerned with the bigger picture.

As an economist, Reed has studied how high energy prices could cause an economic disruption.

Higher energy costs and inflation are correlated, Reed said.

In May, the Associated Press reported a 0.4 percent increase in overall inflation. A 2.4 percent jump in energy costs preceeded the increase.

Inflation is generally described as an increase in the prices of consumer goods, or a decline in the value of money. Essentially, $1 doesn’t go as far as it used to.

The Federal Reserve, now headed up by Ben Bernanke, tries to prevent that from happening by raising interest rates.

The idea is that higher rates make money more expensive to borrow. If less borrowing takes place, less money will be pumped into the economy. Less of a demand means product prices fall.

While it may limit inflation, higher interest rates may not be such a boon to those paying off credit cards or other loans, or banks trying to sell mortgages.

If there’s any good news, Reed said that when you split the country into five regions — East, West, Midwest, Gulf and Coastal — the Midwest, including Ohio, consistently has the second lowest gas prices in the nation, while the Gulf, nearest to the refineries, is always the lowest.