Fuel prices
Never mind those charts you see of the 'average' price of fuel; they are normally wrong for the vast majority of people as they give equal weight to little-used expensive petrol stations as they do to the heavily-used cheaper ones. What you want is a chart of actual prices paid, not prices posted on forecourt signs.
Here is such a chart. Each dot represents a tank of diesel put onto one of my business's (small) fleet of vans, and the lorry. I started collecting this data in april 2008, which is where the chart begins. The vast majority of the data points are at reasonably cheap stations around the midlands. There are a few outlying expensive points, mainly caused by someone running empty on a long trip and filling up at a motorway services.
I don't have any data for petrol I'm afraid, putting petrol in vans causes them to break down, so it's something we don't do.
March 28th, 2011 - 11:12
I’d be interested in the same graph for LPG…
I’ve seen if fall a couple of times over the past few years, but it seems around my way not to be related to the rise and fall of oil prices (only the rise…).
March 30th, 2011 - 19:44
Tell me about it Nick; something like half the forklifts around are LPG, and I’m sick of getting price rise notices from my suppliers, and having to explain to $angry_customer that their gas has gone up again.
Thinking about the economics of it though, its a similar (but worse) situation to diesel; without refineries installing massive multi-million pound machines, the amounts of LPG, petrol and diesel you get from a barrel of oil are constant. Over the past ten years, the amount of diesel and LPG cars has increased massively (compared to petrol) so there is more and more demand for those slices of the oil. Demand up, price up.
You can alter the proportions by having lots of extra processing (cracking, for instance) but that’s expensive, time-consuming and risky to set up; hence the big difference between the prices of petrol and diesel since a few years ago, which has closed up a little now. The same goes for LPG.
What I’m finding at work is that up until a few months ago, everyone was screaming out for LPG forklifts, with a supposed crackdown on diesel exhausts indoors. Now the gas has gone up they’re screaming out for electrics. What they don’t realise is quite how much the electricity price has gone up, and how expensive batteries are due to the price of lead. Doh!