OT: diesel fuel: why isn't it cheaper than gasoline?

Diesel goes up in the fall because for demand in the NE for home heating oil. During the summer months it's lower at the larger outlets then gasoline. Also in the fall people are done with vacations and the demand for gas goes down. As Bill pointed out"supply and demand" determine the price.

JoBo

There's a little bit of faulty logic there. If you're burning 15 gallons a week it doesn't matter if you top off your tank this week or next, over a multiweek span it is _still_ 15 gallons a week. You haven't changed demand at all, you just shifted it one week.

The real demand fluctuation comes from the heating season: Diesel fuel is very similar to home heating oil (can we take the "It is too the same/is not exactly the same" arguments as read?) Maximum delivery for that family of product is restricted by refinery capacity and transportation methods. When demand goes up, so does the price. There are no economies of scale that come into play because the fluctuation is seasonal -- the price will not go down just because you are selling more. Simple capitalism at work.

I said the same thing, later than you in this thread. It doesn't really answer his question, though.

IANAPetroChemicalEngineer, but from what I gather "diesel is less refined than gasoline" is something of a popular myth. Both are distillates of crude oil, along with LNG, jet fuels, various waxes, lubricating greases and asphalt, they just appear at different parts of the spectrum but they are all "refined". Refiners can extend production of lighter products by cracking heavier products, but it still all comes out of that $50 barrel of crude and provides a product in higher demand by sacrificing a product with lower demand.

Fuel prices ain't ever going to go down in any real way. They will only go up from here -- unless the next round of influenza kills off 1/3 of the energy-consuming population.

also, diesel is a commodity, so if other countries are prepared to pay more for it, the price goes up.

That's why the Saudis love Bush so much. I'll bet the Saudis contributed to Bush's campaign in a big way.

-Bill (remove "botizer" to reply via email)

How did Mercedes doom the trucking industry? From what I can tell trucking is big business and the industry still needs more truckers.

-Bill (remove "botizer" to reply via email)

Ten cents an hour only if you are a Bangladshi 11-year old.

Of course, the general cost of living rise has nothing to do with the going OTR pay scales, does it...

I believe that there is more to this story. I'm wondering why the oil companies in the US are posting record profits in a depressed economy? Maybe it's not so depressed now, but it was. Where I live, diesel was recently 2.39 a gallon, the oil companies can hike the price to whatever they want and our government does nothing to help. I heard the bullshit about people 'topping off their tanks, causing the price of a gallon a gas to go up by 50 cents a gallon overnight? It was right after the Prince Edward Sound crash. They saw their oportunity then and have been sticking it to us ever since. Heck, one local station posted $4.00 a gallon right after desert storm began (they were boycotted for a while). The oil companies have the American people by the nads and they know it. They will get away with it until someone stops them.

I was thinking about adding a tank to my diesel truck to hold used cooking oil. Then I can buy a conversion to run it on byproducts from McDonald's. If I had the spare cash, I'd do it now. It's almost free fuel and there is no carbon monoxide. It just needs to be filtered.

East Ohio Gas runs their trucks on natural gas, so there are alternatives. We just need to get them in use and the oil will be less meaningful, demand and price will fall.

Chip

The only thing worse than the oil companies are the damn cable companies.

Still waiting for the hydrogen cells to kill the gas markets. Our city is hellbent on investing solely on new Hydrogen Busses. We have at least 4 now and are slowly converting whenever an old bus dies. I think for full-time vehicles that consume alot of fuel, this is a great alternative. Very expensive overhead cost tho :( Imagine how much cleaner NYC would be if all the cabs ran on Hydrogen or even Hybrid?

And just where do you get that piece of information?

It's you Kalifornians that insist that you cannot get any new sources of electricty except from Natural Gas that is causing my gas bill to triple from what is was 5 years ago. That works out to $1500 a year that you are ripping off from me to support your lifestyle.

griffin proclaimed:

Do your homework before you tiptoe off thru lala land. Your first assignment is to discover where that hydrogen comes from and how it is extracted. Then continue to discover what happens to a mixture of hydrogen and ordinary air as the hydrogen is burned and whether the resulting products are pure water as suggested by the scientific illiterate or something a bit less pristine as happens in the real world. And for the grand finale, compute the total cycle energy costs of actually producing and distributing all that hydrogen. Then take another look at the energy densities available with ordinary old lowly gasoline scrubbed clean by a cat convertor.