I can't believe how much gasoline has gone up again since Christmas. At that time it was here about 1.42 to about 1.49.
Today cheap gas is at 1.69 to 1.75.
My kids and I heard right after Christmas on TV they the expected gas prices were going to drop. I thought cool.
Well they didn't go down they went up 20 cents a gallon and in some places close to 30 cents.
Why is my question?
This just makes me so mad.
I can't afford this being a single parent and my kids can't afford this being college students with what everything else costs.
Is it just here in the Midwest? Or are all of us having to reach in our pockets again?

It's not just the midwest, it's Australia too. In some places it's over the dollar mark. You'd think that with the War in Iraq they might have proven some of those crazy liberals right by exporting oil to the US, but nooo...

I live in the Bay Area; so, I pay alot for gas.

But, luckily, I only drive to my college classes. I can generally get a ride to high school.

Is that $1.69-1.75 per litre? I get confused as to what a gallon is, but in my part of the uk, cheap unleaded is 74.9p per litre. Prices haven't gone up recently, but they did do a few months ago jumping from around 69.9p per litre. I do know I spend a lot on petrol. I travel to university by car, which is 50 miles a day, 3-4 days a week, and I spend around £30 a week.

A gallon is 4.55 x litre, so we pay about £3.41 for a gallon of cheap unleaded, which Im told by xe.com converts to $6.30 per gallon. I Guess it's true, the UK pays atrocious prices for petrol, but then again that could be a good thing, taxed heavily for polluting the place

I think it was the Conservatives, when they were last in power, who set in place the 'escalator' that increases fuel prices with every Budget. The idea was to provide an economic incentive to replace petrol and promote the development of more efficient transport.

It didn't really work, we have very fuel efficient engines now, so that the added expense of petrol in the UK is partially offset by improved fuel economy, but its still a large expense for small businesses etc.

The problem with petrol / gasoline is that it is (slowly) running out, so that once upon a time we could get fuels from the North Sea or Texas, now we use a lot more fuel & the convenient supplies are running dry....so we have to get more and more of our fuel from the Middle East - which is very unstable, so every time something happens fuel prices shoot up.

We should really develop better ways of powering vehicles!

The US better get used to higher fuel prices. You can't produce enough yourselves (less and less each year, in fact) so you have to buy it from abroad. As you make up 5% of the population but use 25% of the energy you'll feel it most.

In the UK we buy in dollars all our oil and despite the dollar falling 20% in the last 6 months we've not seen the price fall at the pump. Partly because it's like comparing the price of potatos to the price you pay in a store for chips. And partly due to the fact that 80% of the cost of gas in Britain is tax.

Everything uses oil. We must remember that. Plastic, chemicals, drugs, power stations, furniture, you name it.

The amount of oil consumed in 6 weeks, half of which is used in transportation, would have lasted 1 year in 1950. (Source: http://www.earthfromtheair.com/facts.html)

Many experts think oil will peak in production by 2015. But the economy will grow. How will this problem be fixed? Not if there's no alternative energy sources figure out by then. This will equal disaster.

But then in a world where 40 million people dying each year of starvation (that's more than the population of Argentina dying every year) is not considered enough of a disaster to change anything I really don't hold out much hope for this oil problem.

There are several technological developments that may be useful......

The most prominent ones are wind farms, solar power etc, but if push came to shove, we COULD increase our nuclear programs and generate electricity that way. I think given the choice between drastically reducing our standard of living and having to deal with nuclear waste, we would take nuclear power.

Cars can be powered through hydrogen cells or batteries. They have several technical problems, which currently make them less economically efficient than petrol powered cars and installing the infrastructure (gas station equivalents) would be expensive.

We are able to produce a lot of interesting materials through biotechnology - which people currently have a lot of problems with as it often involves genetic manipulation of organisms, but , on the small scale, replacements for plastics etc have been made.

Noe of these are available at anything approaching the scale that we would need to replace fossil fuels though, hopefully as oil becomes more expensive (following supply / demand laws) the alternatives will look cheaper & more worthwhile....

Actually, it's because of the winter season and the massive cold. In December, the Saudis and OPEC rose the price of oil. So thsoe 2 are factors.

It has nothing to do with the war in Iraq

Yes, Iraq has very little to do with the oil supply right now, heck, they are buying it from Kuwait, via Haliburton gouging company LOL

Momof3 -

I’ve never understood the price structure of petro once it’s past the wholesale level. EPA regulations require our area to use RFG, reformulated gas. Additives are combined with refined gasoline to lessen harmful emissions. My guess is you possibly live in an area that uses RFG as well. The pricing seems to be more volatile than regular gas.

What I really don’t understand is the ‘zone pricing’. I can go 15 minutes to the next county and it’s typically 20 - 40 cents cheaper and even within our county there are areas where it’s 5-20 cents cheaper. Although I’ve heard it explained several times it never made sense.

Wow! It is soo expensive there here in cleveland it is about 1.49-1.52 thats like 10 cents cheaper then before!

The reason gas is more expensive in Illinois than most other places is simple: Ethanol.

The Illinois state legislature determined that gas sold in Illinois must contain 10% ethanol-- corn gas. This is a subsidy for corn farmers.

There are only 2 refineries (as of about 3 years ago) in Illinois that were capable of producing 10% ethanol RFG.

It's simply supply and demand-- there is not enough supply, and too much demand. The price goes up.

Unless you start calling your state legislators, mom, you should expect your gas prices to remain above the national average for the future.

Also, figure in the excessive gas tax that Illinois imposes on your fuel. Remember when they temporarily suspended it? Gas costs went down about a dime a gallon.

Mike

I think you'll find that fuel taxes have not risen appreciably in this period. I suggest if you want to know where the windfall price gains cuased by a falling dollar have gone, you take a look at the UK operating margins and share prices of BP, Royal Dutch Shell, etc.

As ever, any increase in tax or fuel prices is passed on to consumers immediately, but any drop takes weeks or months to feed through to fuel prices. Since UK road fuel taxes ARE so high and everyone knows it (thanks to those lovely Tory and UKIP farmers who ground the country to a halt in 2000, despite not having to pay any tax on their red and blue diesels themselves) the petrol retailers in the UK are able to gouge to their hearts' content, and everyone blames the government.

Especially the Labour government, despite Gordon Brown's scrapping of the Tories' fuel tax escalator. But then, these same Tory and UKIP fuel protestors are primarily (entirely coincidentally, of course) also pro-hunting, CAP-gorging, tax-averse Thatcherites whose main grievance is that they aren't running the country any more. Poor lambs (in both senses of the phrase).

They also share many of the characteristics with those who rant about speed cameras, not on the grounds that they we not breaking the spped limit, or that the limit could and should be safely raised, but that THEY got caught breaking the law. Imagine if the burgling lobby were to object to the use of security cameras - they would be rightly laughed out of sight, but because the Daily Mail is run by people who will do or say anything to see Labour out of power (the Tory equivalent of Militant, surely?).

On US Fuel prices, they are rather too LOW, if anything. There is no incentive to move towards fuel efficiency since almost anyone can afford to run four or six liter trucks rather than the equally comfortable, far smaller European or Japanese equivalents that can do exactly the same things with two litres or less, can take a corner without falling over, and take less than a week to get up to the speed limit because they are not emcumbered by the hugely heavy automatic gearboxes Americans insist on. And sometimes, just sometimes, we walk or cycle to the store 200 yards away, instead of driving there.

SUV's shouldn't be banned, for sure - it is indeed everyone's right to have one if they want. It is NOT, however, everyone's right to be able to afford to run one. Maybe if you did pay more fuel taxes, you'd be able to afford to fill in the potholes in your roads, and you would not need to ride around four feet above the ground in smoked-glass tanks with mushy suspension so that you don't feel them.

(The absolute worst thing about America is the road surfaces.)

Gas prices in the US are about 1/3-1/4 of prices in Europe.

Why? Taxes, of course.

In Europe, with limited room for new highways, they want to discourage car usage. In Italy, there is a luxery tax if your car's engine is over 1.9 liters, which is why all the vehicles in Italy are turbo- or super-charged.


Remember that even in the US, a large portion of the price of gasoline is taxes.

Gasoline Taxes

Keep that in mind when you talk about "big oil" gouging the consumer.

Yeah, I know that, but that doesn't change the fact that 80% of gas is tax in Britain. So after expenses the standard gas station makes barely a penny per litre in profit. For US readers, that's about 11c a gallon. In a country with average engine sizes of 1.8-2.0 litres. And on a $6.12 gallon of gas!

We have to conserve gas. We really shouldn't be using cars as much as we do or flying as much as we do. That's why governments should be trying to discourage wasteful use. Car pools, for instance, are a fantastic idea but haven't really taken off in Britain.

The operating margins, you refer to are international because the price of oil has risen but the cost of producing it hasn't so their profits rise. It's oil production that really makes the cash. They barely break even on their gas station business in Britain.

I just have to add I wish I understood who I should be mad at

As far as filling up my car, I just got a new one - but it turns out to guzzle about as much gas as the old - so I've been pounding the pavement a lot...

But for heating my apartment!! My roommates and I are all poor students, so the heat never turns on unless it is below 65 F (which is pretty darn cold), and we really don't do that much cooking on our gas stove. However, our recent gas bill went up 400% from what we normally pay... even when I factor in the average winter gas bill price - its about a $100 increase - and with the break down on the bill, its not just the increased taxes that upped the price. Either way, its rather shocking and I wish our gas company would call everyone personally and apologize/explain - so at least I would feel better about forking over so much extra money

Barely a penny a litre, after expenses, on prices of around 70-75p per litre. What's that, about 1.0-1.5%? Excuse me if I don't weep at the terrible situation of the poor petrol retailer - that is about the same net margin as most supermarkets worldwide. (The notable exception being those in the UK, who do rather better.)

The retailers themselves are increasingly not individual franchises, it's true - it's very hard to run a standalone business at such low margins - but are either company owned or franchised to large regional franchises with hundreds of outlets). The economies of scale they gain mean they can afford to trade at these levels.

And when was the last time you went to a petrol (which is what gets sold in the UK, not gasoline ) forecourt that ONLY sold petrol. They all sell convenience foods, newspapers and magazines, etc. now, all of which have rather higher net margins, so their overall business margins are not too bad in global retailing terms.

Plus you completely ignored my point that taxes haven't changed much in the past six months, but the currency changes you highlighted have increased the gross margins by about 20% for UK traders. Since refining takes place as near the point of sale as possible (nearly all UK petrol sold here is refined here) and there has been no significant change in refining costs over the same period, SOMEONE is getting the benefits of the 20% price change, and it isn't the UK consumer. It may well be that the retailer is not being passed the increased margins benefit by the refiner, but guess who the refiners are - BP, Royal Dutch Shell, etc - i.e. the companies I cited in my last post.


Fair point well made, but it's becoming increasingly tricky to organise these. The days when everyone living in the same street worked even in the same town, let alone the same factory, have long gone.

I think that the town planners have a lot of work to do on this, not least by insisting on siting shops, businesses and pubs in amongst new housing developments, instead of building absurd ranks of serried rabbit hutches in faux-village cul-de-sacs miles away from a sterile "village centres" and "business estates" that becomes a wasteland of skateboarding, litter and dog mess after 5 pm. My town is a past master in this, having claimed the record for "largest private housing development" twice in the past seven years for the soulless dormitories it keeps sloughing off at its outskirts.

As you've said, we simply don't have the physical space to develop along American lines - we are a small enough country that sensitive housing builds can still work by allowing pedestrians and vehicles to share the same streets - yet you wouldn't know it from the layout of most new developments.


Like I said, I wasn't referring specifically to petrol retail businesses, but to the oil majors, and all those that operate in the UK have subsidiary UK companies. Company law now means that they can hide these figures from public or even shareholder view through offshore trading and so on, so nobody ever sees the breakdown outside their boardrooms. But put it this way - when was the last time you saw them take a loss, or pay their full corporation tax liability? Maybe if we tweaked UK corporation tax to reflect the full impact and responsibility of businesses that trade here, we wouldn't need to have such high taxes on pump prices?

Ah yes, I remember the time that I agreed to carpool. My next door neighbor's wife was talking to my wife about the fact that her husband had finally put in a purchase offer on the house that she wanted to buy. In the process, they discovered that we both worked in the same building and for the same supervisor. "Why don't you carpool?" was the obvious question, and so we left for work together the next day.

At the 10:00 AM coffee break, he was chuckling about putting one over on his wife. "I put an offer on the house she wanted to buy, at 50% of it's asking price; and it would be contingent upon our being able to arrange financing, and getting a cash buyer for our house at the inflated price I asked for, etc."

I didn't notice him around at noon, but I didn't think much about it. At the end of the day, I discovered that he had gone home shortly after 10:15. After walking home, I learned that a widow had walked into his Realtor's office with a life insurance check. "My husband never let me even look for a home. We always rented." The home his wife wanted him to buy had been on the market over a year, and was part of an estate. He had to be out of the house next door by 8:00 AM as the buyer was willing to pay full price in cash if she never had to write another rent check. Both sales had closed before noon.

Edited to add: I was rudely interrupted by my computer which crashed while I was trying to bring this posting back on topic.

I still am working on an exact formula, but I have noticed a direct relationship with the price of gas, and GWB's level of voter disapproval. The poorer a job rating he receives, the lower the price of gas. It seems illogical, but..

Watch the moon, Mars, your wallet Space adventure raises suspicion, a column by Clarence Page, published January 18, 2004 in the Chicago Tribune raised some interesting issues about this administrations love of oil and gas.




We can't expect to find oil on the Moon or Mars, but it would appear that Halliiburton can hope to sell Oil Drilling Technology to NASA if Bush is re-elected.