Something odd is going on (again).. If things were normal, the price at the pums would have spiked a small amount and would now be going down to the £1.40 ish level it was a month or so ago.
I read somewhere reasonably reliable that while pump prices and crude oil $/barrell obviously bear some relationship other factors are also in play. Something along the lines of....
What we pay at the pump is directly driven by spot prices for the refined product; for motoring this is obviously petrol or diesel. They can be up and down both collectively and in relation to one another depending on quite short term factors.
Diesel is a similar refining fraction to domestic heating oil. When demand for that goes up in the Northern winter diesel follows. Petrol has a usage pattern to rising sharply when the US have a summer 'driving season'.
I'm not saying we're not being stitched up by OPEc, big oil and our own governments but other factors are in the mix too.
I'm sure some of these do factor in, but it's now coming to the end of summer but still before the autum heating season kicking in. Odd why the price suddenly jumped nearly 10% in two weeks, despite other factors not seeming to change or overall(i.e. oil price dropping back whilst £ dropping, by roughly the same)
I could certainly understand it if the price of diesel picked up in late Sept / early Oct as the heating season slowly kicks in, but at the moment, the price differential (even with our washed-out, relatively cool summer this year) is still small, often within 1-3p per litre of petrol.
And other cost factors to our benefit should also be kicking in more and more, such as reduced gas and electricity costs, and yet....
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