May 2020 I was paying 1.699$ a gallon for diesel. I just paid 3.299$ today. Metro Atlanta I have seen prices as high as 3.999$ a gallon. Prices have nearly doubled in less than a year. As they say: winter is coming. With home heating oil being close to diesel I can only imagine what it will cost in February.
Have we tried asking the oil companies to lower the prices? Maybe if we ask nicely.
1988RedT2 said:Let's go, Brandon!
https://www.the-sun.com/news/3849893/what-does-lets-go-brandon-meme-mean/
Just be glad you're not in California...$3.299 a gallon would be cause for celebration.
BTW, I didn't cherry pick...all the name brand stations in my area are charging this much.
You may have noticed it's not the only thing that has gotten more expensive. Not likely to end soon. Possibly never? I suspect gas prices will come down a bit eventually, but it has to be shipped / transported also (see Where is All Your Stuff thread). Oil prices do not seem terribly out of line, historically (a bit high for the last few years course):
Increase in diesel prices will of course generally make a lot of things more expensive (shipping). Even shipping has to use diesel within 200 miles of the US (or is that just CA?).
In CA, we are still trying to figure out how everything as been expensive for a while now (see above post).....
Gas is at 3.099$ here today. I thought California would be over 5$ a gallon for diesel. Winter is going to be expensive. Looks like Venezuela cant help this time.
https://www.reuters.com/article/citgo-energy-bronx-assistance-idUSN1425588920071214
There are some guys out in West Texas who are liking the increased demand.
I though this was pretty funny. I was looking to see if diesel is above $5 anywhere in CA (btw, yes, $5.75 in Beverly Hills, but it's a pretty big outlier):
Basically, CA is out of range for their scale (I am pretty sure this is Regular gas prices).
My boys in the Athabasca oil sands in Alberta will start rolling again. Supply side will pick up when it is established.
The demand for gasoline and diesel is pretty constant, if not rising. If the USA isn't buying it, somebody else is.
In reply to clownkiller :
To be fair May of 2020 is a bit of an outlier for fuel prices. Demand plummeted in March and April and prices followed. As with a lot of other current supply chain issues a lot of production stopped and may only be coming back on line. Throw a couple of hurricanes rolling though the Gulf states, an overall shortage of truckers much less those with haz mat and tanker certification and here we are.
In April, 2020, the price for West Texas Intermediate crude at Cushing, Oklahoma, was -$37. Essentially, they couldn't give it away and had nowhere to store it - all because of near zero demand due to the pandemic. In September, 2021, the same oil was $71.65.
Countries all over the world are seeing demand for energy soaring and prices are spiking. I saw a Chinese worker interviewed last night who said essentially the same thing as clownkiller, not that it makes it better.
11GTCS said:In reply to clownkiller :
To be fair May of 2020 is a bit of an outlier for fuel prices. Demand plummeted in March and April and prices followed. As with a lot of other current supply chain issues a lot of production stopped and may only be coming back on line. Throw a couple of hurricanes rolling though the Gulf states, an overall shortage of truckers much less those with haz mat and tanker certification and here we are.
This.
Comparing to May 2020 is kind of disengenuous because, at that time, oil was trading at negative dollars a barrel. You literally had to pay to give it away.
In reply to 1988RedT2 :
Now that I have looked that up I will give it a thumbs up as is appropriate.
I think I hear the cement truck backing up...
Typical short sighted nonsense. I'm sure you took the May 2020 picture because prices were exceptionally low. So don't act like that price was normal.
dculberson said:Typical short sighted nonsense. I'm sure you took the May 2020 picture because prices were exceptionally low. So don't act like that price was normal.
But you included a meaningful graph!. You are supposed to cut out the part that doesn't support the argument.
I remember when fuel was just a nickle, now in those days nickles had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. Give me 5 bees for a quarter you'd say.
Must be nice to live somewhere with a sub 60 cents/gallon fuel tax.
Fuel prices starting with a $1? Not since the early 2000s here, at least not without a butt load of gas points from the grocery store.
I'm scared of how much fuel oil is going to cost this winter. $2500 last winter, and prices are already 50% higher than they were with no relief in sight.
dculberson said:Typical short sighted nonsense. I'm sure you took the May 2020 picture because prices were exceptionally low. So don't act like that price was normal.
It was normal for a few months. 
Here is one from April 2020. The diesel price jumped to 2.169$ a gallon in June 2020. We will see a doubling of prices by February 2022. That's not normal.
Not a lot of normal in the last year and a half.
In reply to clownkiller :
The fuel prices were certainly not normal in the first few months of 2020.
dculberson said:Typical short sighted nonsense. I'm sure you took the May 2020 picture because prices were exceptionally low. So don't act like that price was normal.
This graph brings back some memories. None them are really relevant to this thread but in the tradition of the internet I'm going to share them anyway.
Notice that prices were pretty steady until around '98-'99. That when I bought my first diesel pickup truck. I'd wanted one forever and as soon as I could afford one fuel prices started to climb.
When fuel prices first when over $2.00 a gallon in Upstate, NY it caused a lot of problems for the stations because up till that point the 1 in the fuel price was painted on the pump in the price window. Most stations bought new pumps but some tried setting the pump at half price with a note saying that you had to pay double the pump price. The state didn't care for that practice and shut it down pretty quickly. Some small stations just closed because they couldn't afford to replace the pumps.
See that spike in 2005? That was from Hurricane Katrina. I was in Louisville, KY, on business, 840 miles from home when the storm hit and overnight fuel prices went through the roof. Some stations had prices set at the maximum that the pumps would allow. It cost me almost $400.00 to fill up the tank in my pickup truck so I could start back home. Fortunately for me the prices got more reasonable as I went further east. Fortunately for the country, they went back down for a bit before again starting their steady climb.
When fuel prices are high the most immediate annoyance for me is that a lot of stations have dollar limit on their pumps and they'll shut off at some arbitrary limit so I can't fill the tank.
It's not just a US or North America thing. Energy prices are way up across the globe.
Fuels, Natural gas, coal, etc are all multiples higher than they were in recent past and in some cases are at or near all time highs
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