BANGOR – It’s not even January and the price for heating oil is averaging $1.50 a gallon.

“You’re looking at midwinter prices right now,” said Jamie Py, executive director of the Maine Oil Dealers Association. “None of us really know why.”

Heating oil suppliers typically refer to an industry that has experienced a sudden change as volatile. This year, with heating oil season less than two months away, they’ve added the word perplexing.

At the beginning of the summer, when international crude oil prices were exceeding $40 a barrel, Maine suppliers questioned why heating oil prices were staying high, too. Usually late spring and early summer is the time when refiners are producing gasoline from the crude and not heating oil, and heating oil prices drop.

Gasoline prices spiked to more than $2 a gallon, but heating oil stayed around $1.35 a gallon, not dropping to around $1 a gallon, more or less, which is a comfortable and expected price level for Mainers.

Hoping that crude oil prices would go down, suppliers a few months ago did not encourage consumers to lock in a price for this coming winter under pre-buy or fixed-rate plans. Numerous suppliers did not offer price-cap programs, either, because of the uncertainty of the crude oil markets.

Now crude oil is more than $46 a barrel – just 53 cents shy of an all-time record that was set early Monday before dropping – and suppliers and consumers still don’t know what to do about their winter heating source.

“The prices are going through the roof,” Bob Moore, senior vice president of Dead River Oil Co. in Portland, said Monday. “It’s a really troubling scene right now. Everything I’ve read says the bottom’s not going to fall out and everything I’ve read says the fundamentals [inventory supply versus demand] don’t support $46 crude.”

Dead River did decide to offer a price-cap program this summer, but the capped price-per-gallon rate under the plan has gone up 10 cents in the last three months.

Under a price-cap plan, consumers do not pay above a locked-in price with each delivery. Right now, the cap is about $1.74 a gallon. If the price goes up, consumers pay $1.74. If the rate goes down, consumers pay the lower price upon delivery.

“If I were a customer and I didn’t have a cap, I think I’d be very sorry come winter,” Moore said.

What’s troubling to a number of professionals who watch crude oil markets daily is that heating oil prices shouldn’t be this high right now. Because a number of heating oil dealers aren’t purchasing as much inventory as they normally would each summer, and making deliveries already to homes, there’s supply in the pipeline.

“Usually oil storage has been in people’s basements and not in those big industrial tanks in South Portland,” said Chris Brown, owner of MaineOil.com, a Web site that tracks heating oil prices from most of the state’s suppliers. “It’s not the oil dealers’ fault right now. Consumers are just like oil dealers. Nobody’s buying any oil because they’re waiting to see what happens.”

While heating oil prices are inching upward, gasoline prices lately have not increased with every jump in crude oil prices as they did earlier this summer.

For the last six weeks, the price of regular unleaded gasoline has stayed around the high $1.80s to low $1.90s per gallon, according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration.

“Higher crude oil prices could create some late-summer gasoline price increases but gasoline inventories are now at the top of the normal range,” according to EIA’s “Short-Term Energy Outlook” report dated Aug. 10.

EIA expects average pump prices for regular unleaded “to drift toward the lower $1.80’s per gallon by fall.”

Last summer, the day before the start of the National Folk Festival in Bangor, gasoline prices jumped 10 cents in one day in Maine and throughout the country, from an average of $1.599 to $1.699.

Py of the Maine Oil Dealers Association said the reason gasoline prices have not jumped lately to match increases in crude oil rates is that dealers don’t want to raise them. Instead, their margins – the difference between their wholesale cost and the price they put on the pump – or profits are being eaten up.

“What’s happening is an interesting phenomenon,” Py said. “The margins are shrinking to almost nothing. The price that you’re paying at the pump is about the same as the price to deliver it to the pump.”