The Universal Truth about oil and petrol prices.

America is quickly coming to grips with the Universal Truth about oil prices : they never go down. Similarly, anyone who thinks they'll ever see less than $2 a gallon at the pumps again is sadly deluded.
The oil companies here have cottoned on to the way things are done in Europe now - put the price up at the pump the instant a barrel of crude goes up, but take weeks if not months to knock the odd cent off here and there after the price goes down.
In the current world of petrol and oil, you can assume pretty safely that the refining / processing costs remain about level. So do the supply and delivery costs. In other words, the only real variable is the price of oil itself. And here is where Americans must learn to complain because nobody is doing the maths any more.
Here, the tax on petrol is flat-rate - a certain number of cents per gallon federal and state. So when the price of a barrel of crude goes up, the maths is really simple.
A barrel of crude is 42 gallons. If the price of a barrel goes up by $1, the price at the pump, assuming everything else is equal, should go up by 2.3¢
That all assumes all 42 gallons get turned into petrol. In reality, less than half of it does - which makes the price rises and maths even more out of whack. One barrel of crude makes roughly 18 gallons of petrol, 9 gallons of fuel oil, 4 gallons of jet fuel, and 11 gallons of other products. ie. only 42% of the barrel ends up as gas, so its fair to say that a $1 rise in the price of a barrel ought to only put the pump price up by 0.9¢ Or to put it another way, since summer last year, the price of crude has gone up by nearly $30 a barrel. The price at the pump should have gone up therefore by 27¢ In fact its gone up by over 50¢ - nearly double the amount. Which does rather explain why BP, Texaco and Exxon all reported record profits in the last 12 months. Time for the Americans to learn another new word : PROFITEERING.
The other thing which Americans don't seem to understand is that "President" B*sh is the reason for all this pain. He invaded Iraq on a lie and turned the middle east oil market hyper volatile. He creates subsidies and policies which favour the rich and favour the oil companies. And he is the person who won't allow more refineries to be built to up the American refining capacity. The oil is there, but B*sh is driving the price up, blaming OPEC for it and then neatly sidestepping the fact that the US simply doesn't have the refining capacity it needs. This all leads to artificially inflated prices, which consumers end up paying because they need their cars (which B*sh knows), and the results are massive profits for the oil companies, who coincidentally all contribute rather conveniently to the B*sh family and campaign.
The circle of lie.

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