Want to lock in today's gas prices? It's possible, but complicated.

With gas prices bouncing a bit this week, the idea of locking in fuel costs near their recent multiyear lows might be tempting. 

Unlike loading up on paper towels when Costco has them on special, though, stockpiling a few months’ worth of flammable liquid isn’t exactly practical. 

In America, of course, there’s often a business that promises to meet impractical consumer wishes. For those who want to lock in today’s pump prices for a long time, there is MyGallons.com. The company offers a way to “pre-buy” gasoline around current prices, to protect against another big surge in coming months or years.

A customer can pay the current price in his or her state for a large quantity of gas, and then “cash in” those gallons any time as prices rise. The amount of the gas-price increase is simply credited to the customer’s checking account, or is loaded on to a MyGallons prepaid debit card. 

MyGallons charges a $30 annual membership fee per vehicle (deducted in "gallons" upon an initial purchase) and a 6% fee upon pre-purchasing gas, and then six cents per gallon as a quantity of gas is “cashed in.” These expenses mean that a customer would only likely begin to benefit if gas prices rose by well more than 10% from today's levels.

Gregory Salsburg, a spokesman for MyGallons, says the collapse in gas prices since last summer to below $2 a gallon in some areas has sparked a rush of interest in drivers locking in prices, as noted in a Wall Street Journal article Tuesday on the rebound in fuel prices. So far in 2015, new sign-ups have exceeded those for all of 2014 and are stronger than they’ve been since 2009, says Salsburg.

A customer doesn’t truly buy gallons of anything at MyGallons. The service simply allows someone to hedge against – or speculate on – a coming rise in gas prices. Drivers buy their gas at whatever stations they want, and are able to log those transactions on the site for tracking purposes. 

Using the service is economically similar to filling one’s tank as usual while investing in gasoline futures, or buying the United States Gasoline exchange-traded fund (UGA), to participate in a potential increase in the commodity in the next several months. If gas prices go down, the customer is out the fees but can wait out the market until they rebound or ask for "unused gallons" to be refunded at the lower prevailing price.

Gamification of the gas market

If MyGallons has any appeal over those approaches, it’s probably the handiness of dealing with a consumer service, along with the mental-accounting comfort and “gamification” elements of pre-buying and timing the market to “cash in” one’s virtual gallons. But in the end, MyGallons is essentially a broker taking a fee to relieve its customers of some price risk. 

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While customers can “buy” as much as they want and can “hold” the gallons indefinitely, MyGallons limits redemptions to 150 gallons per month per car, in order to prevent customers from using the service as an open-ended way to speculate on gas prices. If a customer wants to cash in more than 150 gallons in a given month, MyGallons might ask for gasoline receipts to verify that fuel was bought and burned. 

The company had a rocky beginning in 2008, riding a burst of initial publicity and then becoming locked in a dispute with U.S. Bancorp (USB) when the bank claimed incorrectly that it was not providing a debit card for the service. MyGallons later won a defamation lawsuit against USB, but the dispute nonetheless brought it criticism from some business watchdogs.

The somewhat cumbersome nature of the service and the fees involved show that freezing the cost of a volatile commodity at an attractive level isn’t so simple. 

First Fuel Bank of St. Cloud, Minn., offers a way to buy gas at any of its five owned filling stations for long-term consumption at a fixed price. But that only helps those who regularly find themselves in the exurbs of Minneapolis. 

Those who heat their homes with heating oil, of course, can enter a supply contract that locks in a per-gallon price up to a year in advance. Typically, an estimated annual outlay is split into 12 equal monthly payments.

Many homeowners appreciate having this expense set for budgeting purposes. But, again, it exposes the retail customer to the chance that he or she will end up on the wrong side of a move in the price of a global commodity that even hardened veterans of the trading pits have a hard time predicting.