Britbike forum Forums General discussion The Rod and Tappet Fuel

Blimey, i just paid $2.21/litre for 98 fuel here.
I used to complain when it went up to $1.50 a short while ago.................
I'll have to curb my riding style...............

About $3.80 per US gallon of non-ethanol premium here. Pump says 93, but I guess that's about 97 RON.

Here we (UK) are currently paying £1.40 per litre which is $1.90 US ($7 per US gallon!) and $2.66 AU for E10 rated at 95 octane.

The price here varies hugely by region and major road.

$3.75 per gallon for "regular" in my home town yesterday, thanks to our current quasi-president cancelling the oil pipeline.

$4.35 for diesel.

2011 I know I was paying over $5.00 per gallon.
1998 when I bought The White Whale it was $0.85.
Sure could use that Canadian Mud that makes fine diesel.

The United States became a net exporter of petroleum (i.e., exports exceed imports) in 2020.
https://www.investopedia.com/investing/worlds-top-oil-producers/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20most%20recent,the%20world's%20top%20oil%20producer.

I'm afraid the price of fuel in the U.S. is not based on supply side issues.

yes. the price of fuel in america is proximately based on refinery and distribution capacity, and ultimately based on long term futures committments to domestic use and exports.

oil exports were extremely low from 1950 to 2005, but have increased 400 percent since then.

imports peaked in 2005, decreasing since.

as hugh says, the lines cross in 2020, and the US now exports more oil than it imports.

you can thank wall street and the oil industry for high fuel prices, not any particular administration.

That tar sands garbage costs twice as much to refine. How is that going to help lower costs?
Let Canada build its own refineries and see how they make out.

I'm afraid that it's only going to get worse with the Russians acting stupid.

It really is simple supply/demand economics, NOTHING to do with whomever is President.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-high-gasoline-prices-could-stick-around-for-a-while-11644489001

In short, demand tanked during the lockdowns of 2020. The oil companies curtailed production. Now that everyone is getting out again to make up for the horrors of enjoying time at home, demand has spiked. Unfortunately increasing gasoline production is not as simple as just opening the tap, as too many seem to believe.

Spent 30 years in the oil industry. It's a cyclic business. Prices start to rise and companies start exploring and discovering new reserves. All this new production hits the market and prices fall. Companies cut their exploration budgets and the wells drilled during the last boom go through their natural decline in production. At some point demand starts to outstrip supply and the cycle starts again. The industry has gone through this cycle many times in the last 100 years. History has proven that the political party in power at the time has about zero to do with the cycles.

However, the industry today is not what it was 30 years ago. All of the easy reserves have been gotten. Companies are now forced to drill in deep water and extremely deep and high pressure wells. They have also turned to drilling shale reservoirs. People have known for years that oil existed in shale but the shale was too impermeable to let the oil flow into the well bore. Modern day fracturing technology increase the oil flow. However, these wells have an extremely rapid decline curve. In other words a well flowing hundreds of barrels a day declines to one flowing a few barrels of oil per day in often a matter of weeks. The only way a lot of the shale drillers survived was to use borrowed money and continuously drill wells to keep their production up. Most shale wells had a break even cost at about 50$ a barrel. After the price crash a lot of the hedge fund source of money for shale wells dried up. The deep sea and high pressure wells are also extremely costly and are really only available to companies like Exxon or Shell.

This brings up another point. Often people see the large profits that the major companies like Exxon make and think they are taking advantage of the public. What they don't realize is the huge investments these companies make. Offshore production facilities run into the billions of dollars. If you look at the return on investment that these major companies make it is often under 10%. Compare that to companies like Apple, Microsoft, Facebook ect who make large returns, often over 30%, on relatively small investments based on their market cap. Also, all those billions being invested by oil companies are providing jobs and a fair amount of them in the US.

If you take the cost of living increase that has occurred, gas that cost 30 cents a gallon in 1960 is equivalent to about 3 dollars a gallon in today's dollars.
Given that the cost of producing a barrel of oil has gone from about 5 dollars a barrel in 1960 to 40 dollars today the profit margin is a lot narrower now. In fact, a lot of companies consider gas sales as just a method to get people into their convenience stores. Beer, cigarettes and junk food are the big profit generators.

Forget tar sands. Uneconomic without government support and an environmental nightmare.
Good riddance to the pipeline. Same for ethanol.

$5.00 out here in Commiefornia.

here in Gasolovakia County NC a big company is lobbying/sweet talkin' local politicos for the OK to open a lithium mine ..they offer the usual lures jobs money to dig up a huge tract of land.....at first i thought the lithium was for folks with ADHD like me but wine slows me down OK but then a light bulb went off over my head....batteries

Mobil station near me today in Sacramento, (all gas is ethanol blend in CA), Regular $4.83, premium $5.08, diesel $5.03. The is a station near me that sells 110 octane, off road only use, ethanol free gas, $10.25 gallon.

Ugh....

Driving back from Colorado in Dec., I paid $2.88 gal in Laramie Wyo.

Who needs to smuggle drugs at those prices? The future in contraband, black gold, Texas tea!

So the next thing ya know,
Ol' Goose is a millionaire.
He got himself a Hawg,
And he's ridin' off to where?

He's loaded up a truck,
Got his family tucked inside.
Last time we caught a sight of him,
He was ridin' on the pike.

Turnpike, that is. New Jersey, swimmin' pools, mansions and vintage bikes.

The New Jersey Hillbillies!

Kinda sung to the tune of the Beverley Hillbillies, but in reverse. With apologies to Granny and Uncle Jed.



Ps: sometimes I do wander a bit off topic.......cheers!

Oh yeah, we're at $4.70 a gallon for non ethanol regular out here- a year ago it was only $4.35.......

For interests sake, prices today on the western side of the Blue Mountains in New South Wales (as Phil said about the UK, prices vary according to where you are. Go west from here and they go up somewhat.)

Prices per litre.
10% ethanol 170.9
Unleaded 172.9
Premium Unleaded (98) 196.9
Diesel 175.9
Gas 119.9

While I was writing these down I spoke to a bloke who had recently paid $2.20 for Premium.

My fuel price reminiscence : in 1971 when I was riding a Honda 50 because my Trident had broken a primary chain, petrol was 40 cents a gallon (Imperial, of course). The Stepthru had a 1/2 gallon tank, so the cost of filling it from empty was a mighty 20 cents.

Sammy, in 1970 what was an Australian cent worth compared to a US cent? In 1970 regular grade gas was around 30 cents per US gallon...

Here there are only 2 types of gasoline: super and premium. In the past was another "común" or common or normal and that is what you filled in your old irons; now we put "super"
The cost is about 1.90 Dollars per Liter HOWEVER; the salaries are 3 (or 4) times less than in USA so actually the purchasing power is very low in comparison. That 1.90 is needed to imagine like 1.90 x 3 (or 4) and that is what the real cost per liter is here down S America.

Jeez--Fernandpo--that is crazy expensive.
US$1.90 per litre x3 is US$21.5 per US gallon.
US$1.90 per litre x4 is US$28.8 per US gallon.
I think that you had better move to US!

Well, i came to Aus at the end off '99 regular fuel was 64c/litre around here back then.
Regular is now around $1.90/litre.
The exchange rate when we arrived was about 2.5 dollars/UK pound and fuel in the UK
was around 65p litre. The UK was always ripped off by fuel tax but that is ludicrous.

Well, can we assume the high fuel prices are high fuel taxes to pay for socialized benefits?

Being very unsocial, i never really noticed............................

The US gallon is about .8 of an Imperial gallon so notwithstanding the exchange rate the price was about the same for a given amount

Fuel taxes are easy to levy and efficient to collect.
What governments are going to use to replace them with is a worry
The rich did not cae because they drove company vehicles so it did not come out of their disposable income
The poor did not care s much because the rich peoples RR used a lot more fuel so they see the rich actually paying more tax.

Hi Richard; could be; but I do not know how.

Hi Tony; yes; that way; and they regulate many things rising this price. Also, they killed the train here so all the transport of products etc is by big trucks.
Cost of 1km or black top here is 1 million Dollar! so imagine that those big trucks damage a lot the pavement; that also is charged with taxes to the people but the big companies that own the trucks or the products just only fly away with the money.

Except in the UK public transport is a lot better than it ever was in OZ
A couple of my UK friends have never owned a motor vehicle and apparently that went back generations
No one in my family ever owned a motor vehicle.
The busses ran at 15 minute interval to the railway station ( 3 miles away ) or you could go the other way & catch a bus to the city.
We had busses that went south to the surf , west to a major business hub or north to the city .
We had local shops & local medical services so there was no need for private transport.

The advent of the shopping mall changed this forever .
I can remember when Roselands opened which was the biggest shopping comples in the southern hemsphere and no 3 or 4 in the world .
From then on small shopping centers were doomed and owning a car became just about essential.
The last time I went past the old local shops, nothing there but resturants & realestate agenst .
We used to have 2 hardwear stores a hairdressers, a barber , 2 milk bars , A deli , 2 butchers , 2 small chain grocery stores, 3 fruit & veggie shops , a produce store, two bakeries, a pavlova shop a newsagent, 2 small clothing shops , a chemist , 2 doctors , A dry cleaners & one furnature store + a post office .
So apart from dentistry you could get everything within a 30 minute walk from the furthest point in the suburb
There were another 4 smaller clusters where the busses terminated or bus routes crossed .

One of my bosses imigrated from the UK
He would hve been the first person in his extended family to own a motor.
On his way to the showroom to put a deposit on his new car he passed a £ 10 pom poster so bought his ticket and saved the other £ 40.
That being said, when I went to the UK I checked out what metallurgists were being paid .
Graduates with equivalent qualifications were paid about 2/3 of what I was getting in OZ and everything was at least 1/3 more expensive .