There are two answers to this question. First, stations will not necessarily purchase their gasoline supplies at the same time, which means the wholesale price of gasoline can be different for different stations. Those that purchased wholesale gasoline when prices were lower can afford to have a lower retail price for customers.<\/p>\n
The second reason for different retail gas prices is the gas station\u2019s location. Stations that are at a convenient location, such as near a well-travelled highway, close to residential communities, or on the same side of the street where the majority of traffic is flowing, are more convenient and save time for customers. The stations likely will try to monetize this convenience by raising their price a bit. If customers value convenience more than the increase in price per gallon, then the local differences in prices will remain.<\/p>\n
Ironically, light oil, which the U.S. has an abundance of, is preferred to heavy oil, which many of our refineries were built for. Hence, it appears a simple way for the U.S. to reduce its oil imports and move closer to energy independence would be to convert existing refineries from using heavy oil to using light oil. This would appear to be an easy fix, so why aren\u2019t we doing it?<\/p>\n
A big reason is cost. To convert a refinery from using heavy oil to light oil would likely cost millions of dollars, and possibly close to $1 billion. There are also potential local zoning restrictions, environmental worries and other regulations to address. <\/p>\n
A potential solution to reaching energy independence is, of course, to reduce our use of oil, particularly for driving. Currently, 91% of U.S. vehicles use oil-based gasoline for fuel. There have been attempts to use other fuels, such as solar, hydrogen and electric-powered batteries created from alternative fuels. But so far there have been uncertain results from these efforts.<\/p>\n
While our county is a big oil producer, we still must import foreign-generated oil, meaning we are not energy independent due to the type of oil our refineries must use. Is it important for us to be energy independent? Should we accept the costs and change the regulations so we can make our refineries compatible with the oil we produce? Or should we increase our efforts to use alternative fuels for driving? These are important questions that you, and everyone, must decide.<\/p>\n
Mike Walden is a William Neal Reynolds distinguished professor emeritus at North Carolina State University.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are two answers to this question. First, stations will not necessarily purchase their gasoline supplies at the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":664468,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,290500,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-664467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-columnist","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=664467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664467\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/664468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=664467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=664467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=664467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}