Diesel fuel has been higher here for at least the past 4 years since my Dad bought his '07 Dodge. There's no real reason behind it, I suspect in areas where diesel pickups are more plentiful, diesel fuel is higher.

 

The only thing I can see is that when gas goes sky high people drive less. Can't do that with diesels, since almost all the trucking industry is operated by diesels. Sad thing, diesel is cheaper to produce, and is a byproduct of refining oil into gasoline, by this it should be cheap. Biodiesel was a great way to go when it first came out, but people like Willie Nelson who helped commercialize biodiesels just used it as a way to earn more weed money, keeping the price of the bio at $0.10 less a gallon than petroleum diesels. If somebody would just produce bio at a reasonable price, say $1.00- $1.50 a gallon, they would still make a ton of profit and would in turn bring the price of petroleum diesel down as well. It is all about greed. I was watching a show in the Discovery Channel about this leaning tower that some sheet-heads over in Dubai are building and the entire time all I could think about was how my money went to pay for it. As long as OPEC sets prices to protect the greed of the industry and as long as we are all dependent solely on petroleum fuels regulated by OPEC, we will always fall into their "regulated" gouged prices. Sort of like if all of the grocery stores got together and decided to all equally hike their prices up 200%... what could we do about it but grow our own food, those of us who are fortunate enough to be able to? Bottom line, OPEC needs to be destroyed. It is a monopoly, plain and simple.

 

Still about 7-8 cents higher than premium gas here. Back in Ohio, deisel was had been about 4-5 cents above premium gas were I lived; but if I went over to a truck stop about 10 miles down the road, you could always find diesel at the price of mid grad gas (89 octane gas).

 

I'm a huge advocate of sustainable energy; but bio fuels just don't make since IMO. Think about it, a farmer spend all summer growing a stalk of corn that get turned into 0.01 gallons of ethanol. I can burn that in my truck in about 5 seconds. Sure you can get better mpg with a diesel, but it's not going to counter act the fact that you can burn the fuel far faster than they can grow it.

By the time we could get our fuel consumption in this country low enough to use bio fuels, we would already be able to completely rely on domestically produced oil.

Countries like Brazil can do this though, because the number of people who drive is small and the number of farmers is large (specially the farms who don't use vehicles).

 

We can blame the EPA for that one. ULSD is more expensive to produce than LSD ever was, and then it has to be treated to increase it's lubricity so it doesn't break things. This is a large reason why it's more expensive than gasoline.

I completely agree with your comments on OPEC, but greed isn't why Bio is expensive. If it's not commercialized then how would you produce enough of it to matter? Companies don't artificially jack up the prices, it's all related to the price of oil which is a product of global supply and demand.

Biodiesel is unusable to ANY of us. PSDs before 2011 are only designed to run on max 5% bio. Biodiesel is some nasty stuff and if you were to try and run anything close to 100% bio you would be replacing a very expen$ive fuel system in very short order.

This is very true with the current technology we use to make E85. There's some great looking stuff on the horizon though, look at Coskata, Inc.. Making ethanol from waste biomatter is going to be a reality soon, and I expect it's going to make it a viable alternative for those with flex-fuel vehicles. And unlike corn ethanol it won't need these ridiculous government subsidies to be cost effective. Biodiesel may never work due to how hard it is on a fuel system, but I believe ethanol may be in our future if it can be sustainable and cost effective.

And the fact that they make their ethanol from sugar, not corn. This method is MUCH more efficient than ours!

 

The production of ethanol from bio waste is certainly a viable option. It still needs more work, but is getting there. It still won't be able to fill this nations huge need for fuel, but it may cut down the overall demand. Unless of course, people go out and buy non flex-fuel V10 engines

Although I guess the future V10 are going to be E20 compatible.

Yup, sugar cane is much easier to get ethanol from. Sad thing is the US paid for that entire infrastructural to be set up. We watned to know how easy it would be to convert a society to Ethanol, so we paid for Brazil to do it... Odd

When it comes to energy though, in the end all our fuel will have to be hydrogen that will be derived through some sort of solar energy. But in the mean time, we shall burn dead things from long ago.

 

Where I live diesel is $2.85-2.90 and regular gas is $2.40-2.45.

 

Around here diesel is about $0.25 higher than regular. Its been higher for at least three years, maybe longer. I only started taking notice of this in 2007 when I was truck shopping, and at that time, it was almost $1.00 higher than regular.

I think about a year ago diesel almost got down to the same price as regular, for a month or two.

 

Exactly the same around here.
JL

 

Man, that farmer is not too bright if he grows just one stalk of corn. lol
But seriously though, I agree on Ethanol, by argument is for biodiesels though. Bio can be produced as a nice blend substance to petroleum diesel to make a nice fuel that does not utilize only one primary source of substrate. I understand where you are coming from as far as seeing it that veggies are limited supply, but for that matter so is dino squeezin's. In order to drop the cost of fuels it is important to introduce fair trade, and as long as prices are regulated by one source it will always be unfair. If we are to have reasonable fuel prices we will have to do a few things. For one we will have to break ourselves from the hold of OPEC. Secondly we will have to decrease our dependency on one or two fuels. This can be done by introducing different fuel sources and making them more commonly used. The cost of this will be expensive, but so is the economical cost of high fuel. The third thing that we will have to do as consumers is to understand a reasonable fair price and live with it. It would be nice to enjoy $.89 gasoline prices like when I first started driving, but that is not a realistic number in these times- with the value of the dollar being what it is and the cost of producing newer fuels being higher than they used to be. Not saying that we need to bankrupt the oil companies, but they are definitely taking us all over a barrel (pun intended) and are getting insanely rich off of us all suffering.

 

With my 7.3 getting 20 mpg's and my 5.4 and your v10 getting 15 mpg's, it still comes out cheaper to drive my 7.3. Driving 500 miles costs me $71 in my 7.3 and $80 in my 5.4 and your v10. Using a generous estimate of 17 mpg's for the 6.0/6.4 it would cost $84. So to me, the 6.0/6.4 cost more to buy, cost more to maintain and cost more to drive even if you don't factor in reliability issues.

 

Actually, if that farmer is smart he can make really good money off of that one stalk of corn. I grew this stalk for Bill's mom and made a ton of money off of it last year.

 

They Smoke

 

Not saying that bio should not be commercialized, just that it should be commercialized outside the holds of OPEC. Obviously if it is not commercialized it would not be practical, but that does not mean that it has to be governed by an organization that will jack the price through the roof. Willie is a prime example. He did not have to do it through OPEC and yet his bio is still within a dime per gallon of OPEC petro fuel. The cost of producing 100% bio last year for a friend of mine was $.60 a gallon, and that is privately. Now sure, the cost will go up when you factor in the fact that commercially the veggie oil will have to be purchased instead of just making a trip to Burger King and getting it by the 55 gallon drum for free, and the cost will have to go up initially to buy the larger equipment, plus the cost of commercial fuel will have to rise as sellers will have to cover the building, pumps, employees, insurance, etc., but the cost of materials other than the base oil will go down as you buy in bulk. All in all, $1.50 per gallon for bio would not be at all unreasonable.
As far as pre-2011s not being able to run pure bio, that is not necessarily true. With a few easy mods this can be performed. Besides, if the 2011s and 2012s can run pure bio which cost $1.50 a gallon, it will drive the price of petroleum based fuels down for those of us who drive older trucks.
BTW, you all remember when a small oil field was "threatened" to be attacked and bombed a couple of years ago? Over night the price of fuel was jacked well over a dollar because of this threat to a small field. Three months ago the Deepwater Horizon blew up which spilled as much as 50,000 gallons of oil into the gulf a day. The cost not only was in the millions of gallons of oil spilled, but also in the cost of cleanup, PR, diving stocks, low sales for BP, etc. Plus, this has hurt the reputation for off shore drilling, threatened the future of one of our nation's primary sources of oil, and has even harmed the reputation of the oil industry as a whole, and yet prices have gone down. It is a scam, the whole thing. If they could get away with it, OPEC would charge $100 a gallon for gasoline.
All in all, you are right. Prices are all about supply and demand, and as long as the supply is set by one organization and the demand is mostly non-adjustable, we will always be at the will of those crooked players who are only looking to make as much money as they can off us regardless of the cost economically. Problem is not that supply is low or that demand is high, but rather that the supply is all from one source which gives them an illegal advantage (speaking as a monopoly). Best thing that could happen is for the Government to take over BP, use the stocks to help pay for the cost of the cleanup and claims, and independently operate the company at reasonable prices thus forcing the cost of OPEC fuels down.

 

So you are the one! I lost Tiffany for a year and a half in that.... not complaining, I finally got some rest.