Gas prices have been rising slightly in New Jersey in the past week. But an industry expert says it is no big deal.

This week's Jersey average is $2.30 per gallon, up from $2.28 one week ago, according to newjerseygasprices.com. But oil analyst Tom Kloza of the Oil Price Information Service in Wall said overall, "I do not think that people have to worry about it too much. I mean, this is going to be another year of cheap fuel prices."

He said it is still pretty unusual to have cheaper gas prices in July than in January.

"I do not suspect that we will see that much action. OPEC is very, very ineffective," he said. "That is not your normal pattern, and it is just a little bit of a, man-bites-dog kind of summer."

"It is going to continue on a cheap path, and I think that the path is a little bit higher for the next six or seven weeks, but after Labor Day, demand drops about 500,000 barrels-a-day, the recipe for gasoline is a little bit easier to make, and so we are going to see cheap fuel, and it is a question of who takes credit for it," he said.

The biggest upside, according to Kloza?

"The other thing that I suspect is that in the last hundred days of the year, we are going to see prices, nationally and regionally, go down quite a bit," he said.

Kloza said it's possible we could dip below $2 dollars-a-gallon in Jersey by year's end.

Lowest Gas Prices in New Jersey
New Jersey Gas Prices provided by GasBuddy.com

Joe Cutter is the afternoon news anchor at New Jersey 101.5.

More from New Jersey 101.5:

More From New Jersey 101.5 FM