Price of Diesel Coming Down
As a potential future owner of a diesel vehicle, I have been watching diesel prices (relative to gasoline prices) fall in Northern California. I just checked with the California Energy Commission web...
Forum Discussion
naturist wrote:
Not at all.
Happens almost every year.
Has to do with the way they run refineries.
For the summer vacation/driving season, people buy lots of gas, not so much heating oil. Diesel fuel is produced along with the production of heating oil, not gasoline, so the market sells gas and demand drives up the prices every summer, while heating oil languishes at the distributor and prices fall. In the winter, everybody buys more heating oil, not so much gas, so heating oil (and diesel) prices rise and gas falls.
I've been watching this phenomenon now for over a decade. And if you look up historical fuel prices, you will see this goes on every year. Some years more so than other, depends on how mild the winter was.
This is spot on. I work for an Oil and Gas (Natural Gas) company; I spend a lot of time with the fundamentals group for long range planning. The only problem with diesel is...long term the price is expected to out pace the price of oil. This also has to do with refining capacity and what products the market ultimately demands. Efficiency gains in energy usage over the past few years and the expectation that it will continue as technology gets better actually puts upward pressure on diesel. This is over a 20 year period though so please take with the biggest grain of salt in your pantry....
