jaunty75

We can only hope.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles...gn_id=DN091714



Gasoline prices in 2014






How times have changed. I remember when $3 gas was considered astronomical. Now we're hailing the possible return of it. Around here, most stations are below $3.20 per gallon for regular. I filled the tank this morning for $3.17.

Oldsguy

According to the map the lowest prices look to be in Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, East Texas, and maybe Missouri and Illinois (not sure without state lines added). I wonder if this is because they border the Mississippi River and are Southern States. I am not a real genius when it comes to economics but just made a stab at that assumption.

BackInTheGame

I filled up this AM at $3.52 for regular in the south Denver area. It's dropped only 4 cents in the past five or six weeks. The premium my 442 likes is still at $3.82 - OUCH!

Oldsguy

I missed Virgina, and think that maybe Tennessee isn't included so I am not sure of the reason at all now.

Oldsguy

It was $3.15 just south of Dallas yesterday.

jaunty75

It's almost always a combination of things. State taxes on gasoline vary considerably around the country. Also, proximity to refineries can matter. Third, the article mentions that the shale oil produced in North Dakota gets to the south more easily than it does to the west because there are more rail lines going south. So crude is more plentiful in the south, even if it isn't necessarily produced there, leading to lower prices.

Check this chart for state taxes on gasoline. Not surprisingly, New York is #1 and California is #2. The next three are Hawaii, Connecticut, and Illinois. At the lower end, numbers 46 through 50 are Oklahoma, South Carolina, New Jersey (surprising), Wyoming, and Alaska.

http://taxfoundation.org/article/sta...ates-2009-2013

oldcutlass

It's $3.15 here in Mayberry. There is no reason gas should be as high as it is. We are overflowing in gas and oil to the point now they are talking that we should start exporting again.

Mr Shifty Sidney

Seen some at 3.0? on my recent trip to the Redneck Riviera(Florida panhandle).
Don W

chip-powell

I live in southern Maryland (about 30 minutes south of DC). One of the 40 taxes that our wonderful governor has raised over the past few years has been our state gas tax. He raised it 12 cents a gallon. Next year, it is supposed to go up another 10 cents.

I just paid $3.47 a gallon for 87 octane here in Maryland. This past weekend, I drove over to Virginia to get some cigarettes and paid $2.95 for 87 octane.

If you are wondering why I drive to Virginia for smokes, a carton in Maryland costs $70, while in Virginia the same carton is $32. Gotta love those taxes!!!

One last thing, Maryland is the only state in the union that actually has a RAIN TAX! Yes, believe it or not, our governor has taxed the rain that comes out of the sky. Just thought that I would let you all know, because this idiot is actually going to run for president in 2 years.

Nilsson

Gasoline already is one of our largest exports, has been for many years.

pogo69

Gasoline has been steady for quit a while...enjoy it now because it is goung to start rising in price soon

Seff

We're down to $7.60 for a gallon! Yay!

joe_padavano

Back out the taxes and compare just the price of the gasoline, not the gov't imposed tax amount.

Seff

Without sales tax and energy/pollution taxing, we're closer to $3.29 a gallon.

starfire

Paid $3.18 in Ionia Michigan this afternoon. Price in Lansing is about $3.30, price in Farmington is $3.59.

coppercutlass

Living near chicago does not help me but 3.52 is welcomed by all means lol that's what gas cost per gallon this morning . If it drops down to 3.20 ish I will be saving lots of coin. Since I drive 525 miles commuiting to work per 5 day work week.

Jetstarjim

We're down in the $3.20's here in S. Ohio, but you really have to keep your eye out. One minute it's $3.24, I decide to run into the grocery store first, and BAM!, $3.59! Those new digital signs irritate me. Used to, if you saw a guy in the lot with a long stick and some numbers, you could fly in and fill up before the pumps jumped up, lol!

joe_padavano

There ya go.

The US Federal gas tax is about $0.18/gal. States pile on at different amounts. Here in Virginia the state tacks on another $0.20/gal. Back that out of the current cost per gallon and you end up a little under $3/gal. All of a sudden the big gasoline price difference between Europe and the US isn't so big. Taxes are something the local government does and are unrelated to what gasoline actually costs.

jaunty75

But he was talking about oil itself, not products made from it. A ban on the export of oil has been in place since the '70s, and with our current production boom, many think that those restrictions should be eased.


http://www.npr.org/2014/09/16/348745...-to-export-ban

RandyS

It seems strange that Oil is our biggest import, and yet some want to export it........ Seems to me that if we just use our own oil, we are not dependent on other countries and our gas prices would be much more stable (and lower). It's crazier still that as the price of oil goes down, as it has been recently, the pump prices only trickle down slowly, but let the price of oil go up a buck or two and the pump prices jump the next day. There oughta be a law...........

jaunty75

I don't know what mileage your car gets, but if it's, say, 20 mpg, you're buying 26 gallons of gas per week to go 525 miles. At $3.52 per gallon, that's $92 per week. If the price drops to $3.20 per gallon, your cost drops to $83 per week. That's a savings of $9.00 per week. Not trivial, but, on the other hand, is that your definition of "lots of coin?"


If you're driving something that gets closer to 30 mpg, you're saving about $5.00 per week for a 32 cent lowering in the per gallon cost.

coppercutlass

Hey 9 bucks covers my tolls for the week. Pennies add to dollars and so on and so forth. I got a saturn and I'm spending avg about 45 bucks per week. When gas is higher I spend about 60 per week. 15 bucks a week x 4 is 60 bucks a month if the prices stay steady for the month. I don't go by mpg I go by what I spend per week. 60 bucks is a bill right there lol.

jaunty75

This issue has been discussed many times over the decades, and it's not this simple. The U.S. is a big country, and sometimes it's cheaper for, say, states on the west coast to import oil for their refineries by ship from Canada just up the coast than it is to transport it by rail or pipeline from somewhere farther away but within the U.S. By the same token, if we're producing lots of oil in the southwest because of the shale boom, we might be better off financially sending that oil by tanker to countries in the Carribean or South America than sending it by rail or pipeline elsewhere in the U.S. It costs money to transport oil, so the closer the refinery is to where the oil is produced the better.

We could build more refineries in areas where oil is produced, but people don't want refineries in their backyards, and, with government regulation being what it is these days, we have built no new ones since the '70s. The U.S. may be awash in oil, but we don't put oil directly in our cars. It has to be refined into gasoline, and if the refineries we have are already running full tilt, that new oil can't be processed as it's being produced, and that's what determines the price of gasoline.

Remember, also, that one of the reasons we have this oil boom is because the price of oil is high enough to financially justify these new, exotic means of extracting it from shale. If the price of oil on the world market were to drop back down to what it was back in the halcyon days of $1.20 gas, it wouldn't be financially viable to continue to extract this difficult-to-extract oil, domestic production would shut down again, and we'd be back where we were in terms of dependence on the Middle East.

There's a sort of an old saying that you can have all the oil you want at the right price. The world has a surplus at $150 per barrel. We have none at all at $25 per barrel. Similarly, we can have all the gasoline we want at $4 per gallon. We can't have any if we want it for $1 a gallon.

oldcutlass

Mine gets about 6 mpg driving local back and forth to work and a few extra miles here and there, probably around 102 miles every 2 weeks. Runs around 16 gallons or $60. I remember when I could drive that much back in HS at a cost of about $8.00.

tru-blue 442

3.01 This morning at the local HEB grocery store
for the cheap stuff. .20 more for medium grade,
.30 over that for premium. I remember it wasn't that
long ago it was only .10 per grade jump.

jaunty75

Let's go a little farther with this. $60 per week times 50 weeks per year is $3,000 you're spending per year to commute to and from work, not counting the wear and tear on your car plus the 2 hours per day each day you spend in that car doing the commute.

If you're driving roughly 500 miles per work week, that's 100 miles per day, which means you live 50 miles from your job. If you moved so that you lived, say, 5 miles from your job, your commuting cost for gasoline would go down by 90%. That means you'd be spending $300 per year for gasoline instead of $3,000. Is it worth $2,700 per year to live where you do relative to where your job is? I'm not saying it's not. I'm just saying it might be something to think about. In all of my working years, I've never lived more than about 6 miles from my job.

I don't know what your yearly income is, but if it is, say, $50,000 per year, you'd be giving yourself a perpetual 5.5% per year pay raise by living closer to your job. Of course, if your income is, say, $100K per year, then this gasoline cost is a much smaller bite on your income, and it's worth it to spend what you're spending to live where you do.

jaunty75

But the difference should be a percentage, not a fixed amount. As the overall price of gasoline goes up, so should the price separation between grades. If it costs, say, 5% more to make 91 octane versus 87, then the price of 91 should be $1.05 when the price of regular is $1.00. That's what we remember. So when gas is $3.00 for 87 octane, it should be $3.15 for 91. Of course, some of this difference is marketing, but overall, the separation should grow larger as the overall price does. After all, it would be kind of silly if gas were to reach, say, $10.00 per gallon for 87 and be $10.05 for 91 (not that I couldn't see it happening).

Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to recall reading once that it actually doesn't cost any more to make the higher octanes than it does to make regular, and the only reason there is that few-cents-per-gallon difference is because consumers expect the premium fuels to cost more than regular, so they're willing to pay that difference, so oil companies and gas stations are more than willing to charge them that difference.

jaunty75

Don't we all. But that was also when hamburger was 25 cents a pound, a loaf of wonder bread was 10 cents, and the average annual income was $2,000 per year.

As much as we gripe about the high price of gas, in inflation-adjusted terms, gasoline isn't much more now than it was in the '60s and '70s. According to the government's inflation calculator

http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

$3.00 per gallon in 2014 equals 39 cents in 1964 or 62 cents in 1974. Those are a little higher than what gas actually cost in those years, but not much. We all just have a greater sensitivity to the price of gas because anyone who drives a car, and that's most of us, buys a lot of gas relative to how much we buy of other things. We think nothing of buying 10 gallons of gasoline per week, but we don't buy 10 gallons of milk per week (about $3.50 per gallon last time I looked) or 10 gallons of house paint per week ($30 per gallon the last time I looked) or 10 gallons of Head and Shoulders shampoo per week.

jaunty75

Gosh I'm wordy.

RandyS

Quite a few if's, what if's and so on. If you look at where we import most of our oil from, those ports are thousands of miles away. The per barrel price does not inlcude the cost to ship it here. The difference between shipping it via boat thousands of miles vs by rail for hundreds ought to be fairly small. Refineries rarely run at full capacity, but, IMO, it would still make sense to build new refineries near the oil sources than to import oil. There is open land not in someones back yard in most every state.

11971four4two

still $6.45 gallon for 110 proof race gas in dayton

coppercutlass

Well I almost quit lexus to work 2 blocks from my house at a well established reputable shop. Lexus gave me more than what the shop I was going to work at offered me. Plus at my age being able to say I'm the only body man at the dealership looks great on a resume . I think every shop I have applied for I get a call back. So I'm sticking around because of that too but the benifits are great and so are the people. The drive is the worst part.

Sampson

I worked in a full,service Texaco Station in High school. It was pretty common for a customer to come in order $2.00 worth of gas and get his windshield washed and oil checked and he never got out of the drivers seat. Oh and I pumped it squatted down behind the back bumper with a cigarette hanging from my lips. Times have changed.

jaunty75

Everything you say is true. I've wondered why we don't build more refineries, and I hear it's the basically the same reason we don't build nuclear power plants. The cost of complying with environmental regulations makes them financially not viable. The current administration is no friend of the fossil fuel industry, which compounds the problem.

Your point about buying oil from the other side of the world is right on, too, and what it all comes down to with oil is that it's price is not a function of the cost of finding and producing it. Oil is totally a world commodity, and it's price is based on politics and perception.

It's long been true that Saudi Arabia could single-handedly control the price of oil. Why? Because it is the world's single biggest producer, and almost all of it is exported. They open the taps, and the price goes down. Close the taps, the world perceives that oil is in short supply, and the price goes up. Over the decades, they've actually used this muscle to keep the price from getting too high, because when it does, other, non-OPEC sources (like shale!) become economically viable and become a threat to OPEC's dominance.

Their biggest fear is US, the United States, because we are likely, with the way trends are going, to become the world's largest producer of oil in the next half decade or so. WE could be the ones controlling the price of oil. But we won't be able to. Why?

Because we can't export any of it!!!!

We don't actually have to export it. All we need is the possibility, the threat that it could be exported, and we could control the price of oil. No one in the world is more fearful of the possibility that the U.S. might relax its ban on crude exports than the Saudis. They would lose control of the world market, and we would gain it. This, to me, is one of the greatest missed opportunities for our country in recent times, and perhaps we'll get lucky and Congress will finally relax the ban in the near future. Sentiment seems to be moving that way.

jaunty75

How long ago was this?


We all have fond memories of the good old days, but things were different. I remember reading once that gas stations back in those days, what with not infrequent price wars and all, rarely made any profit from the sale of gasoline itself. The reason for the full service and the windshield cleaning and the oil level checking was to develop a good rapport with the customer so that he would come back to that service station when he needed a tune-up, oil change, or whatever, all of which were needed much more often on cars in those days. It was the service bays where the station owner earned his livelihood, not the gas pumps.

But now we have very few gas stations that still have service bays. Everything is a Sheetz or a Speedway or any of a dozen others, which are more grocery or convenience stores than they are service stations, and stations have to make more of their income from sales at the pumps.


I always thought the worst innovation as far as running a gas station nowadays was the introduction of pay-at-the-pump. With this, there is no need for the customer to even come into the station. So the possibility of impulse sales is lost. How many more Cokes or candy bars or whatever might gas stations sell if every single person who came to buy gas had to actually come into the store and stand in line for a minute or two? While they're standing there, they look around, they might pick up a paper, they might remember they need a loaf of bread or a quart of milk, and an extra sale is made that the consumer hadn't even been planning to make when he came to fill up his tank in the first place.

Don't get me wrong. I love pay at the pump. I can get my gas and get out that much faster. But I know for sure I'd have bought many more Reece's Cups and who knows what else over the years if I had to stand in line in front of them every so often. Heck, Autozone has a hefty candy display at the cashier, and that always makes me laugh, but I find myself tossing a Snickers or a Butterfinger onto the counter along with whatever I came in to buy more often than I care to admit.

Redog

It's a crime to say "Wow I only paid $3.00 for gas"

Back when gas was $1.21 a gallon here, before 9/11, and in 2002 it was $1.33 a gallon. Assuming the rate of inflation is 4%, then

2003: 1.38
2004: 1.44
2005: 1.50
2006: 1.55
2007: 1.62
2008: 1.68
2009: 1.75
2010: 1.82
2011: 1.89
2012: 1.97
2013: 2.05
2014: 2.13
2015: 2.21

But yet in the late half on 2014 we are paying more than $3.50 in some places. Remember when gas was $4 a gallon. Yeah the oil companies wanted gas to be $3 a gallon so then jacked it up to $4, so that when it went back down to $3 everybody would be breathing a sigh of relief.

But yet in the 2005-2008 time frame, oil companies where making record profits. Gee I wonder why

Gary M

$6.99 per gallon 102 octane in Mo. Never thought I would say it but I will pay that for my classic. Paid $3.27 for regular unleaded 93 octane today for my company truck. Thinking of drilling (or shooting) in the back yard. Might even change my name to Jed Clampet if I thought it would help. Darn Arabs.

auto_editor

The first step is admitting you have a problem. Next comes finding a career that pays you for it...

Octania

Well, yah, but your countries are only like one hour's drive all the way across!

sbceater

Whew this was an interesting read my eyes hurt now haha