Pro-tip, if you're driving very, very little look up an ethanol-free gas station on pure-gas.org and fill up there when your tank is nearly empty. It'll cost more but you don't want ethanol sitting in your gas tank, fuel filter, and engine for months. An alternative is fuel stabilizer but make sure you do your math correctly and don't add to much or or too little.
I predict a surge in cars that won't start when the stay-at-home orders are lifted.
This is 100% correct. After about 6 months in the tank, ethanol gas starts turning into sticky garbage that doesn't want to burn. I have a few classic cars that sit a lot. A couple times a year I drive an hour to my nearest ethanol-free gas station with a trunk load of gas cans. I'm sure it is incredibly dangerous, but I haven't had any fuel system problems since I started doing it.
sorry, "sticky" is wrong in the context of ethanol gas in a modern-ish tank for a few months. However, when any gasoline is exposed to oxygen it forms solids called "gums." My 1971 car has a tank that's vented to the air so it did form a layer of sticky gunk after about 15 years of sitting. Ethanol absorbs water which makes it "not want to burn," corrosive to metal components and it will deteriorate plastics and gaskets. Modern fuel systems are designed with this in mind. But, my '79 Porsche 928 with its mechanical fuel injection (an analog computer that runs on fuel and air pressures) really hates it.
I cannot fathom the supposed environmental reasons for disallowing ethanol-free gasoline. It is an ag industry subsidy via federal mandate to have 10% ethanol in gas, and in a politics-free world we would remove that requirement.
Friend of mine is in the car battery business and he's gearing up for a huge surge of dead battery replacement business when this is all over. Doesn't really make up for the lost OEM business from the car manufacturers but it's something.
I have my truck on a battery maintainer. Saves having to start it for a trip I otherwise wouldn't make (or would use a car for). I use it only when I have a task that needs a truck which only happens a few times a year, everything else I take the bus.
Cars don't care. They'll run on 3+yo gas (though I wouldn't risk it in anything that needs premium for reasons beyond the scope of this comment). It's stuff with carburetors that you have to worry about, particularly two strokes, marine 2-strokes seem even more finicky for whatever reason. Also, modern car fuel systems are well enough sealed that there's not much moisture ingress.
The whole "gas goes bad in X months" this is basically an urban legend at this point but it's continuously propped up because most white collar people's experience with gas older than a few months is trying to pull start some piece of garden power equipment that has the cheapest carburetor known to man on it, a compression ratio in the ballpark of "maybe" and barely runs on a good day and then can't start once you make the gas even mildly less volatile. Old carburetor vehicles could certainly gum up but they'll do that with premium too.
If you don't daily drive a moped, motorcycle or bicycle with one of those engine kits you'll be fine.
Source: Formerly employed in an industry where filling up your vehicle with free junk gas was one of the perks of the job.
i think the main issue is seals/gaskets dry out, crack, and fail without oil pumping around. After not driving for a while, it's not so much the gas that screws things up but the lubricants.
/disclaimer: any time i raise the hood on a car the repair cost is automatically 2x the cost had i not raised the hood. I am not a car guy not matter how much i wish i was.
I went to the grocery store yesterday and couldn't start my car! turns out I left my phone charger in the 12v socket and after 5 weeks without driving it drained my battery.
Ethanol has a much higher octane rating than conventional fuel so mixing it in with regular fuel provides for a higher octane rating without needing more additives.
If you don't use your car, or all you do is just going for groceries, Old advice is to drive 10km once a week. Go to a road or motorway. Let the engine work.
You are mixing facts. Ethanol absorbs water, but it does not turn into varnish over time, that is the gas. Ethanol that absorbs water separates out from gasoline but it is still liquid fuel that flows just fine. (it burns fine too, but you will have a hard time starting the engine on that mix)
Gasoline is not a single molecule. It is whatever the refinery wants.
Plenty of ethanol advocates have successfully stored ethanol fuel (no gasoline) for years without issues. It can have problems, but they are over pushed by oil shrills.
I didn't check all of the states that are under $1, but here in NY all of the locations listed that are under $1 are Indian Reservations. Reservations here sell gas, and cigarettes (and a bunch of other stuff) without the state/federal taxes, so it's way WAY cheaper. I assume this is the same in all states?
In my area it's still around $2/gallon. I'm not close enough to a reservation to bother making the drive, but many people (especially smokers) make regular drives to get gas and smokes.
Costco doesn't care about making money on the things they sell, in general.
Costco makes more money from membership fees [1] and this is basically their stated business model. They try to sell everything at a small markup (just covering overhead) and the membership fees are basically profit.
Costco and Woodmans in the Madison area are under $1 as of a few days ago(Costco because memberships, and Woodmans because no credit card fees). Smaller towns had 93c at the regular gas stations the week before.
I have noticed in the past that when oil prices are going down, Costco becomes waay cheaper than other places. But when the oil prices are rising, Costco is not that cheaper.
In other words, Costco prices are updated more frequently than regular gas stations.
A lot of gas stations set their price based on a fixed markup from their costs, and only update their prices when they get a new delivery. High volatility and low sales volume can lead to outdated prices that way.
Chicago area, I haven't seen anything below $1.79. I'm making an assumption that the station owners are trying to make up some lost profit from the lockdowns.
I've seen a few threads about local gas prices in some of the less degreed, bluer collar and more rural filter bubbles I'm a part of. Everyone reporting super low prices is either a stone's throw from the refining infrastructure or buying on a reservation. Most people seem to be paying $2+/- $0.50 as of a few days ago.
Edit: changed my wording because apparently some of you would rather have me tiptoe around the differences between HN and the general population.
As a data point, here in the semi-rural Midwest I'm paying $1.60/gal. I'd guess if I took a road trip to the res it'd be close to $1, though probably not less.
In not entirely unrelated news, some electricity providers in the UK have been paying you to charge your electric car[0] today. There have been other days recently where the "agile pricing" has also gone below zero, e.g. 5 April[1]. With the lockdown no-one is supposed to drive anywhere unless absolutely essential though (so e.g. the NHS doesn't have to deal with casualties from traffic accidents), and they're talking about banning cars on some roads for a period when lockdown is lifted[2] (to make it easier for people to walk or cycle).
It's cheap because it's in low demand at the moment. You'd only be taxing essential workers (thanks for risking your health because we have no social safety net) and logistics, which would raise prices for the consumer.
I just don't think now is the time to raise the gas tax.
It's better than that! Used steel barrels go for around $29 a piece. All you need to do is buy oil, dump it out somewhere, and then sell the barrel for $17 profit!
There's a difference between someone saying the premise of the joke doesn't make sense and not finding it funny. It seems like it went over someone's head if they say "Yeah, but oil isn't sold that way" versus saying "That joke wasn't funny."
See, this is why we need a good EPA in the US and similarly good in other countries. To protect against capitalists like you who don't care about externalities. ;) Now go make a financial derivative so I can trade on used steel barrels.
What we need is an oil barrel subscription service. For just $20/mo, they'll deliver a barrel of oil to your house or business. For $25/mo, they'll throw in a bucket of coal. Makes a great holiday gift.
Wouldn't it be better if I store the oil for you and give you a certificate instead? You could buy it instantly and you could just email or whatsapp your christmas gift of coal...
Even better if the certificates are cryptographically signed in a chain and their custody is verified though a solution of the Byzantine generals problem.
I know gasoline is a commodity and it doesn't matter what the source is but my understanding is that crude oil from Saudi Arabia is better (probably subjective) than crude oil from Canada?
I don't get why people don't just store crude oil and not process it for a bit (I'm guessing six to eighteen months)? I looked online and it seems that for a car, you should fill up the gas tank if you're not going to drive much for months and still go around the block about once a month?
"I don't get why people don't just store crude oil and not process it for a bit (I'm guessing six to eighteen months)?"
It's the same answer as a lot of "economic mysteries" right now: At scale, everything is really hard.
If we have all this commerically-targeted food that can't go to the consumer market, why can't they just sell it in stores? Well, at scale, everything is really hard. You have to set up supply lines. You have to set up packaging. You have to get the stores to stock it and price it and just a whole bunch of things. Existing consumer supply lines can't be used because they're generally at capacity. Your commercial supply lines are different in numerous ways, from the companies that have it down to the physical nature of the trucks delivering it. And on and on.
The other problem you have is that even though bringing this all up is perfectly possible, it's highly risky. What if the companies spend all this money to bring up a new supply chain or massive amounts of new oil storage, only for the problem to resolve itself a week before it opens? You could build a big storage tank only to open into a market of record high prices for all you know. Sure, if you had a magic crystal ball there's probably all kinds of ways you could make make massive amounts of money from this disruption, but nobody has one.
> It's the same answer as a lot of "economic mysteries" right now: At scale, everything is really hard.
Except this has already been scaled, and is already happening. The US strategic petroleum reserve (and similar programs in other nations) is exactly this: a giant buffer of storage capacity designed to make cartel exploitation of the oil industry infeasible.
And it works. The reason we're having this crash now, when the lockdowns started 6+ weeks ago, is precisely because there is a big pool of idle storage able to "store the crude and not process it for a bit".
But now all that buffer is exhausted, so we're seeing the crash everyone knew was coming.
I was implicitly answering the question of "why not just build more"? I know we have some.
It is true that we have some already, and that does make it somewhat easier to build more (it's not like we've never done it before, we have the software and businesses ready to go, the tooling presumably exists somewhere), but there's still substantial expenses that doesn't help with (the tanks still have to be built, land may have to be acquired, you can't just build one in the middle of nowhere in Kansas, you have to have it where the oil can be shipped to, inspections and permits because even under these circumstances I'd still rather like at least the important ones to happen for something like this, etc.).
Is it full? I recall that the stimulus bill originally included a provision to buy more oil for the strategic reserves, but that the measure got removed by the Democrats. (Both sides are capable of making mistakes...)
Why is it a mistake to not buy oil for the strategic reserve right now? The mission statements are all talking about dealing with low supply, but the problem right now is low demand. Is the mistake that it would be cheap right now to "top-up" the reserve?
> The mission of the Office of Petroleum Reserves (OPR) is to protect the United States from severe petroleum supply interruptions through the acquisition, storage, distribution, and management of emergency petroleum stocks
> The sheer size of the SPR (authorized storage capacity of 713.5 million barrels) makes it a significant deterrent to oil import cutoffs and a key tool in foreign policy.
> Such conditions have only existed three times, most recently in June 2011 when the President directed a sale of 30 million barrels of crude oil to offset disruptions in supply due to unrest in Libya.
> to address short-term, emergency supply disruptions to a refiner's normal operations on several occasions.
As to why people don’t store it.. well, we (as a nation, and also the oil industry) try to but it’s only possible to store limited amounts of liquids (notoriously because liquids are incompressible), especially when you’re talking about thousands to millions of barrels per day.
Estimates are that oil demand has dropped by 30% globally, the OPEC+ meeting last week showed us a ~10% global cut by Saudi Arabia/Russia/US... which still leaves a meaty 20% surplus.
A lot of the recent contention has been around when all the (strategic) reserve tanks will fill up and cause the price to really plummet... which we’re seeing now.
It is difficult and dangerous to handle and store crude oil:
"After revealing a long-held plan to try to buy a barrel of crude, I was now receiving a disappointingly stern lecture on the dangers of hydrogen sulfides. The wine tasted vaguely sulfuric, too."
They had a story on this at Marketplace. Storage is limited and not free, with oil tankers being used as extra storage units during the glut, at an increasingly large cost. Also capacity reduction is not trivial either, particularly for smaller wells that can't just shut down (vs larger wells that can slow down extraction).
> Plus you can sell at a profit when prices rise, although you'll need a lot of storage capacity if you hope to earn anything remotely substantial.
You'll probably need a special license to sell oil in large amounts, considering the complications involved in storing, transporting, and disposing of it.
You actually need to tell your broker that you want full execution of the contracts otherwise the default is for your broker to sell the contract before delivery. And even so, your broker will expect ability to receive the shipment before they allow that liability to go unchecked
I have been averaging a dollar per gallon for over a year now in Indiana. Just get a gas card. At my store https://www.kroger.com/fuelfaqs?storeNumber=02900364 "up to 1,000 fuel points can be redeemed for up to 1 dollar off per gallon at Kroger Fuel Centers in a single transaction"
So I buy my groceries, accumulate 1000 fuel points & then fill up once a month.
Ofcourse, it all balances out - my wife has an EV & pays $150 back to the state :( https://www.myev.com/research/interesting-finds/states-that-...
The downside (also from Indiana) is you have to go to Kroger. It’s about the third chain in line of grocery stores I want to go to due to general dirtiness and high end product selection.
Sorry, I am relatively new to your state. This my second year in Indiana. I tried going to Meijer https://www.meijer.com/ a few times. imo clientele's too posh & everything felt too upscale, clean & stuck up. I tend to skew blue collar. When I think grocery I want a see an unkempt farmer pull up in a truck & dump 100 pounds of broccoli in crates so there's stalk and leaves all over the store, and that is exactly Kroger. I then get to pick up the broccoli for a dollar. If I go to Meijer they wrap the broccoli nicely in plastic & charge $5. I don't have that kind of spare change. For $5 you can rent a whole vm on linode & get a business going.
I know a guy that thinks Meijer is below him, and won't shop there. Likens it to a low-grade Wal-mart. And he lives near me and so I know which Meijer's he's been to, and there's nothing wrong with those stores.
I certainly have no problem shopping there, and I think it's cleaner than most local stores (that aren't high end, there's quite a few of those around here), certainly better than Wal-mart, although Wal-Mart does have a better delivery service, we just found out yesterday.
Meijer has cheaper Broccoli than that. Just checked their website, and you can get broccoli for $2 a pound, or a giant 32 oz bag of fresh florets for $5, which I guess is what you're referring to, but that's easier to cook with and prepare, so there's probably more demand for it in that form, and has similar prices elsewhere (my local Wal-Mart has that priced at $6 right now). You can also buy 12 oz bags of frozen broccoli for $1 each right now at Meijer.
And I'm near Chicago, which is probably more expensive than Indiana. Even the Whole Foods near me is only selling broccoli for $2.50 a pound.
In general, Meijer is a direct competitor to Walmart. Cheap, and low end.
Kroger is the bargain basement grocery store chain. Has all your groceries. A few fancier items. A real selection (unlike say an Aldi that only stocks some products). But not fancy at all.
Amusing that your local Meijer is fancy. Most Meijer are not. There are some nice and new and fancy ones, same with Kroger (went to a few real nice Krogers in Indy).
And if you can use a phone number to redeem the points, use Jenny's number. You night have to pay inside vs at the pump for that. One could also try getting a replacement card that has Jenny's number attached to it. That might be considered fraud though; I'm not a lawyer.
Storing oil isn't easy, cheap, or safe. I doubt many people have tanks, the know how, or the permits required to store oil. Then once the price goes up you have to move the oil again. It's all really complicated.
They are. The world is simply running out of suitable tanks. Yes, that's a thing when global oil demand drops by 30% but production is only cut by 10%. Even if you disregarded every law regarding oil storage and started filling up water towers and tuppaware containers, exactly how many of the ~25,000,000 excess barrels of oil now being produced DAILY do you think that would account for?
You linked to state sales tax on gas, but are there other burdens? Local sales tax, bond payments, other taxation for road maintenance, etc? I don’t live in CA, but just thinking your pump price may be encumbered by more than a sales tax.
Probably mostly supply and demand. People in CA might have more disposable income than those in Wisconsin. Texas isn't under $1 despite having low taxes and lots of nearby oil drilling.
No, CA gas is always $1 more because Californians will pay it. It's not a true free market that responds to supply and demand. Even when it's refined locally and should benefit from savings in transportation cost, it's always more. The CA market is broken out by CA-EPA requiring CA-specific formulations for inauthentic "environmental" reasons.
For example, CA "winter" gas adds oxygenates to "reduce CO and soot" by 10%. However, the resulting fuel has 10% less energy, so you have to burn about 110% of it to go the same distance.
One of the early oxygenates was MTBE[0]. Genius move, that. Save the environment by poisoning groundwater!
So you’re saying supply is restricted in CA? How can that be? We have now shortages of gas stations, and no shortages of gas. In fact we have many refineries here.
Tax is closer to $1 [0]. Gas stations are supply restricted in the sense that their storage tanks are finite in size although it seems to me most of the price is because they can.
The federal taxes are true for everyone. So you can subtract that from your difference across the US.
But there’s no lack of competition, and plenty of apps like gas buddy that aid in that. That should put pressure to reduce prices, yet neighboring states can be so much lower. Something else is going on.
Not the only reason. Until last week Russia and Saudi Arabia was in a price war, which was/is a large part of the reason for the low gas prices, at least in the EU.
My understanding was that the price war was still, indirectly, caused by the Coronavirus. The price was dropping a little early on when the virus was mostly confined to China, and the OPEC countries couldn't agree on who should cut production... so they broke up and made everything worse.
I bought some 6 gallon jugs about 18 months ago, but you'll spend more on the jug than what you'll save.
(I use them to store ethanol-free gas for my power tools. I buy the gas at an airport about 25 minutes away from my house, and at $6 a gallon, it's "worth it" to make a trip about once a season.)
The airport that I go to sells both unleaded and "low lead." It's very easy to choose the "unleaded" pump. It's lower octane than 100, but I don't remember the exact value.
I live in area with lots of natural disasters and store fuel on site. It’s already full, but thinking about buying another tank to take advantage of the prices
I filled my car in Wisconsin for the first time in 2 months at $0.989 for 87 octane. I think the last time I paid that price the attendant filled it for me.
The states on that list include New York, Michigan, Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Ohio, Colorado, Missouri, Iowa, Virginia, Wisconsin, Kansas and Kentucky.
Keep in mind though that prices are not in any way shape or form set at the state level. This could just mean that one small region of the state has that price while the major metro areas where 95% of the states population live are 250% higher still.
> Keep in mind though that prices are not in any way shape or form set at the state level
Gasoline / Diesel taxes vary pretty widely from state to state. Taking from either end, gas in Alaska is taxed at 14.6 cents per gallon, while California's gas tax is more than quadruple that at 61.2 cents. The gap is even bigger for diesel.
Maybe this is a semantic critique, but the assertion that prices are not set at the state level seems a naive one. They're not "set" at the federal level either, but taxes bear on the price significantly at both levels, though more uniformly at the latter.
I live in one of the large metros in Ohio, prices are all still $1.30-1.50/gallon here. Like most of the locations in the article, I would guess the sub-dollar prices are very isolated locations or special circumstances (no-tax native american reservations like I saw in other comments?)
Is this website about internal combustion engine fuels? Or it's just an aggregator of all american newspapers? I thought HN is something about software and programming.
One of my cars is a long-range Tesla, the other is a plug-in hybrid that can go about 30-ish miles on a battery.
At the beginning of the lockdown, I looked at my wife and said, "let's stop touching icky gas handles during this whole thing and make sure we only charge at home."
So all of our distance driving uses the Tesla, and we use the plug-in hybrid for in town driving.
In my case, I'm an environmentalist. A good friend of mine, who's an Uber driver, just bought a Model 3 Dual Motor, same car that I have. (Although I don't know if he paid for enhanced autopiolot.)
> Must be nice to be rich.
Money is also about understanding the difference between the cost of equipment versus the cost of ownership. A gas car costs more to operate than an electric car.
It's easy to misunderstand the cost of an electric vehicle. In general:
1: $60k: I spent (rough numbers) $60k on a Model 3 Dual Motor
2: -$10k: I got $7500 back from the federal government, and $2500k from my state. (Purchased in December 2018)
3: -$10k: I will save (rough numbers) $10k over the life of the car because charging at home is cheaper than buying gas, and because electric cars are much cheaper to maintain. (I had a Leaf for 4 years and only paid to rotate the tires.)
My Model 3 Dual Motor is (roughly) like spending $40k on a gas car. Plenty of middle-class people buy cars in this price range.
The difference is that more of my ongoing costs are in the loan, which never changes, compared to things like gas, where the price fluctuates.
That's not a good way to describe HN. Yes there are a lot of software engineers here, but there are many others as well. They're just as welcome and HN is just as much "for" them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22923025