When I started writing here on April 20th, 2009 I had a good situation for posting. My job was tech support in the evenings, so I could post about a spike when I saw it in the morning at home, and gather numbers and post them at night on the job during slow times. In September, my son was born, and he took a little of my day time, but the job at night still allowed me to post. That night job switched to day in 2010. In 2012 we added a daughter, and I moved to another job, this time delivering for a courier service. Free time to do this has greatly diminished.
I’ve tried to keep up the Today in Oil and Spike Line pages, but some days that doesn’t happen. In the case of the Today in Oil page, I post most information the next available moment, as I did for Thursday and Friday’s numbers today. I have not posted out here in quite a while.
As this kids grow older, and hopefully I get a better job within the company, free time will open up, and I’ll be able to devote more of my time to better analysis here, and posting more about what I see on gas prices. Until then, I will continue to do what I can to contribute. I have automated most of what I do, so it takes 20 minutes normally. I even have begun updating the charts more often by automating most of that. I also changed the colors. They used to reflect universities (Indy=Butler, Indiana=IU, Michigan=UM, and Ohio=OhioU) now they reflect pro teams (Indy=Colts, Indiana=Pacers, Michigan=Pistons, Ohio=Bengals/Browns) with Today in Oil switching to SWMU colors.
On the good news front, I crunched some data and historically May is the most expensive month for gas in Indiana going back to 2009. The trend can be seen in the graph below. Note, 2009 and 2010 seem to be outliers, and they are because of the economy being in depression at the time. But I included them because taking them out didn’t change the trend on the average.
Will we see gas trending down for the rest of the year? That is what the numbers show. Let’s hope we don’t have a repeat of 2012.
Can anyone explain why gas is so high? Crude oil isn’t that high, so what gives? Are we just being soaked?
Two things I know of…..1)Stations are trying to improve their margins a bit and 2)stocks although not particularily low, are not very high. Possible contributors: a)QE1, QE2, and QE3 has pumped a lot of excess $$ into the commodities market, pushing up the cost of most anything, except wages. b) the cost of gasoline production is more based on Brent Sweet Crude than West Texas Intermediate. c)Oil shale delivered via train is not as cheap as oil shale delivered via pipeline, and oil production via fracking is not real cheap either. This is how the US is now s uplimenting imported oil, not so much with crude from the conventional well. It all adds up to no more EVER under $3 gasoline. Funny though that regula is mow more costly than diesel, which is traditionally 20 cents more expensive than regular.
With CBOB and RBOB so close together, I would not be surprised if there was some sort of refinery issue, although none have been reported. But we are also not seeing low supplies. I’d need more time to evaluate, which unfortunately I don’t have at the moment.