The price of oil has gone from $120 a barrel in the summer down to just about $75 now. The reason? Turns out, there are lots of them. 

“No. 1 is the global economy,” said Michael Noel, who teaches economics at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. “One of the main drivers of going from $120 a barrel down to $75 a barrel is that we may be entering into a global recession.”

Another factor: OPEC+ just said on Sunday that it wasn’t going to reduce oil production in the coming quarter. 

“So we’ve got, you know, a little more crude on the market now than we would have expected maybe a week ago,” said Hugh Daigle in the petroleum engineering department at the University of Texas at Austin. He added that not only is supply higher than expected, demand appears to be falling.

And here in the U.S, Daigle said that means the price of gasoline will likely continue to drop.

“The forecasts that I’ve seen project that we will see further declines in the price of gasoline, perhaps go below $3 a gallon, national average by Christmas.”

That’s a nice little gift for consumers over the holidays.