Petrol Prices

[Lardmeister]

Just a quick look at current US Dollar prices per US gallon of petrol in different parts of the globe:

US 3.85
UK 5.80
Norway 6.30
France 5.55
Japan 4.25
Russia 2.10
Kuweit 0.80
Venezuela 0.12

[Chaky]

Croatia 7.7 (3,7 l)

[ChrisHunter]

Don't get me started of petrol prices in the UK ! I'm spending £60-£70 on the stuff in an average week at the moment.

The tanker drivers are planning on going on strike in a weeks time too so it's going to be like something out of a Mad Max film at the pumps this time next week !

[SHOVON222]

The prise is really increasing.

[cereal]

Here in Italy is high: 9.50$ (in euro 7.17€) per gallon.. ~1.895€ per liter but in some places we arrive to 2€ per liter... this happens because almost 60% of the final price is composed by government taxes and vat..

[Agilemind]

Canada varies from 5.45 - 6.36, Although I doubt that is above the actual full price if you considered all the extra costs (health costs and crop losses due to pollution, costs due to natural distasters due to climate change etc...)

[Ancient Dragon]

Don't get me started of petrol prices in the UK ! I'm spending £60-£70 on the stuff in an average week at the moment.

I think I would ditch the auto and ride a bike. That's terrible price for petro.

[Chaky]

I think I would ditch the auto and ride a bike. That's terrible price for petro.

With these gas prices, I can't afford the new bike.

[ChrisHunter]

I think I would ditch the auto and ride a bike. That's terrible price for petro.

I'm thinking of investing in a motorbike, more expencive than a bicycle but cheaper than a car (which is £2000 for insurance per year).

[vegaseat]

If you are rich enough to buy one of those new electric cars, you most likely won't mind paying 8 to 10 bucks for gas/petrol.

Just took a look at:
http://www.chevrolet.com/volt-electric-car/

and:
http://www.nissanusa.com/leaf-electric-car/index
http://www.nissanusa.com/leaf-electric-car/index#/leaf-electric-car/index

They are sweet little cars though! In the USA there is a nice tax credit too!

[Chaky]

Maybe the petrol isn't so expensive after all:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QS-gHtYge74

[jwenting]

If you are rich enough to buy one of those new electric cars, you most likely won't mind paying 8 to 10 bucks for gas/petrol.

The Volt has worse mileage than the average European non-hybrid car :)
The Leaf is terrible, no performance or range.

I drive a hybrid myself, without the tax credit I wouldn't as without it the cost of purchasing, maintaining, and driving one would be higher than that of a one class smaller regular car, which for me is still large enough, a regular car that is more fuel efficient btw..

[vegaseat]

According to the Chevy Volt spiel you should be able to drive the first 35 miles (after fully charging) electrically, then the gas motor kicks in.

In our area electricity prices are high (ca. 12 cents/kwh), despite the fact that Hoover Dam is only a few miles away and so is a huge solar plant. I am not sure how many kwhs equates to a gallon of fuel. Or, how many miles/kwh correspond to miles/gallon of petrol/gas.

[ZZucker]

Sooner or later all cars will run electric, then we will have to post a new thread called
"Kilowatthour Prices"

[happygeek]

Actually, I think it's more likely they will run on water. Hydrogen cell tech seems to be where the really big research and development investment is at.

[Ancient Dragon]

If you are rich enough to buy one of those new electric cars, you most likely won't mind paying 8 to 10 bucks for gas/petrol.

Whata bet? I have a 2011 Toyota Prius that gets 48-52 mpg, but I still bitch about petro prices.

[HiHe]

Well, water is not hydrogen. It takes a large amount of energy to create hydrogen from water.
All Toyota Prius owners hate to see the time their super expensive battery dies on them a few years down the road.

[jwenting]

According to the Chevy Volt spiel you should be able to drive the first 35 miles (after fully charging) electrically, then the gas motor kicks in.

Worse, they sell it as an electric car, never in the commercials mentioning the gasoline engine or mileage at all. The only hint it's not a real electric is the note that when the batteries run dry something else kicks in (I think they call it a "range extender device" or something like that).
Pure and simple fraud if you ask me.

[vegaseat]

Maybe somebody could invent a "windup car"?
The compressed air car is probably the closest thing to it.

[Stuugie]

I hate petrol prices and despise the multi-billion dollar (a day) companies that control the flow as it were. I see scare tactics when hurricanes hit oil nations and the barrel prices go up and so do the pumps, almost instantly. Yet, when barrel prices go down, the pumps do not in any timely fashion. It's all economic bull sherbert and I find it frustrating to live in a world that is run by corporations and elite regimes.

[HiHe]

The Amish, the only group that isn't upset about the high price of gas.

[mike_2000_17]

Actually, I think it's more likely they will run on water. Hydrogen cell tech seems to be where the really big research and development investment is at.

Hydrogen cars are a red herring. I remember my first class in thermodynamics (back in my second year of my Mech. Eng. degree), as a basic introduction to thermodynamics analysis, the prof proved how idiotic it is to even attempt to use hydrogen to power cars. Even some engineers working on hydrogen cars concede that's it's all a big waste of time, but hay, if car companies pay people to waste their time, it's their problem, but don't buy the hype, because creating the hype is the point of it all.

By and large, the main issue with any kind of transportation energy source (fuel, hydrogen, gas, electricity) is light-weight energy storage systems (or energy-capacity versus system weight). Complex chemical fuels (like fossil fuels) provide incredibly high-density energy storage systems (about 12.5 kWh / kg), about 10 times better than hydrogen (compressed gas) (about 1 kWh / kg) and about 40 times better than current battery technology (about 0.1-0.3 kWh/kg). For hydrogen, it's pretty much pushed to the theoretical limit right now, so there isn't much hope (while liquid hydrogen is good for some purposes, it is not viable for transportation). For battery technology, there is some hope as there are infinite possibilities for electro-chemical storage, and there are electric cars with decent autonomy (of course, the batteries are still super large and heavy compared to an equivalent fuel tank, but at least, they fit in a car). And I've heard recently that thermal storage could be pretty awesome with some composite materials that have very high heat-capacity and 99% to-and-fro transfer efficiency.

"Green" people are obsessed with hydrogen fuel, but they need to wake up and realize that it is just the chemical fuel at the bottom of the ladder, and that you need to move higher up to more complex synthetic chemical fuels if you want to reach any practical usability as a replacement for fossil fuels. But car companies love it when "green" people invest money down the drain.

In our area electricity prices are high (ca. 12 cents/kwh), despite the fact that Hoover Dam is only a few miles away and so is a huge solar plant. I am not sure how many kwhs equates to a gallon of fuel. Or, how many miles/kwh correspond to miles/gallon of petrol/gas.

Gasoline has about 36 kWh / US gallon. Considering that you'll loose about 70%-75% of it to the heat-engine (depending how good your car is), you're really just getting about 10 kWh / US gallon. If a gallon is 3.85$, then you are paying about 38 cents per kWh, which is about 3-4 times more than what you would pay for electricity (also considering about 10% loss when using electricity to power a car). BTW, I live in Quebec, we have nationalized electricity, and we pay about 6 cents per kWh (and CAD is at par with USD, btw, so canadian money is not monopoly money!), while we pay about 1.2 $ per litre of gas (about 4.5 $ per US gallon)!

[Ancient Dragon]

Hydrogen cars are a red herring. I remember my first class in thermodynamics (back in my second year of my Mech. Eng. degree), as a basic introduction to thermodynamics analysis, the prof proved how idiotic it is to even attempt to use hydrogen to power cars

That's what people told Christopher Columbus in 1492. They also said the same thing about people who tryed to learn how to fly, or others like Henry Ford and his horsless carriage. Just because current scientific knowledge doesn't know how to do it, doesn't mean someone someday won't figure out how to do it.

[mike_2000_17]

Just because current scientific knowledge doesn't know how to do it, doesn't mean someone someday won't figure out how to do it.

There is a difference between things that are believed to be impossible due to ignorance of the underlying physics, and things that can be proved to be impossible based on solid and well-tested scientific knowledge. People don't try to turn lead into gold anymore because now we understand to a very high degree of certainty what gold and lead are and how hard it would be to turn one into the other, for all practical matter, impossible. Hydrogen cars are pretty much in the same category, along with perpetual motion machines (do you think those are possible too? You never know, right?). Sure, there is always a possibility, however small, that there is some big breakthrough that flips all of known thermodynamics and particle physics on its head. But, applied science (a.k.a. engineering) is not in the business of trying to do things that are theoretically impossible while crossing fingers that some magical discovery is going to save the day.

The idea of a round Earth maybe wasn't main-stream in Columbus' time, but it had already been around for millenia, and I would imagine that anyone who had traveled a bit across latitudes (especially when navigating between Africa and northen Europe) would have had strong reasons to think the Earth was indeed round, and would have had a hard time navigating without knowing this, at least, implicitly. I would imagine it wasn't as wild an idea as people might think, especially amongst experienced sailors, convincing the royalty was the hard part. The point is, there was no strong evidence against a round
Earth, and there was massive evidence (even more evident to a sailor) for the idea of a round Earth, so, he wasn't doing something that the experts deemed impossible, quite the opposite actually, just something that lay-people (including royalty) would find hard to believe.

As for Henry Ford, he created the assembly line, he didn't invent the car. The invention of the car was a very gradual and incremental process with many important inventions and inventors along the way, and an incremental building of an understanding of the principles that make it work. People like to have this romantic view about inventions or breakthroughs, they like to think that there was a guy with a crazy idea that everybody thought impossible and that this guy persevered and made the impossible happen (and then lived happy everafter..). The truth is, that has almost never happened, even inventions we consider breakthroughs were developed very gradually (often over generations) and based on a solid understanding (knowing it is possible to do it), like the telephone, the airplane, the rockets, the atomic reactors, the car, the steam engine, the combustion engine, the radar, GMOs, etc.. None of these things were invented by a guy with a "crazy" idea, they were known and understood to be possible (but hard) and, therefore, there were often many people working on the problem, some died, leaving the work they did, and some carried on with it and finally made it happen. But, they wouldn't spend all this time trying to invent something if there wasn't good reason to think that it was possible in the first place.

The idea that applied science is (or has ever been) carried out like alchemists brewed their concoctions is baffling to me. Applied science works because it works the opposite way. Fundamental (or pure) science gives the reliable models that allow for predictions to be made about what is possible and what is not, then engineers try to make the possible and useful things happen. And then, there's the feedback loop, when engineers need something that doesn't exist yet or isn't well understood yet, and then they do some (pure) science of their own to build models that will serve as the basis for the next design or "invention". The point is, you never do something if you can't at least understand it to be theoretically possible, if not, but you have a hunch that there is something to it, then you do scientific enquiry to understand it better before you move on. But, if you understand something very well already, in every meaningful detail, and that this understanding tells you that your goal is impossible, then it is only madness to continue, and that's exactly the case with hydrogen cars, IMHO.

[Reverend Jim]

Actually, I think it's more likely they will run on water.

I have a boat that runs on water.

Our electricity here in Manitoba is relatively cheap, mostly hydroelectric and produced by a well managed public utility (thanks again Bob) with excellent staff (right Stuugie?). Unfortunately, electric/hybrid cars are so expensive that most people cannot justify the added cost up front.

And don't get me started on this BS about how when crude oil prices go down "it takes about three months for the cheaper oil to work through the system and result in lower prices at the pump" but an increase in crude is reflected at the pump the next day. According to the oil companies' reasoning and the current price of crude we should be paying around 95 cents a litre but we are actually paying around $1.25.

[Stuugie]

with excellent staff (right Stuugie?)

Heck yeah! I got to have breakfast Mr Brennan 1 month before he retired and he seemed to be a man that cared greatly for his employees and the future of hydroelectricity in Manitoba. I know that MB Hydro has been testing the load feasibility of all electric vehicles and my division manager was even test driving an electric car over last winter. He has had two main issues and you pointed out one Reverend Jim, the cars themselves are too expensive at this time as well as he said that the electric vehicles are not ready for our northern climate (he got cold a lot).

As for the BS regarding the RJ's point about fluctuating prices at the pumps compared to barrel fluctuations, I think it is all BS too! It seems that pump prices go up according to market speculations and will almost instantly increase when the barrel goes up in value. However, the same does not apply when the barrel goes down as RJ pointed out. There are many excuses and topic skirting when these so called oil experts talk about why this happens and it is all crap imo.