Why do gas prices go up immed when barrel price jump, but dont drop as quickly when they fall?

Question

Trying to figure out why gas pump prices jump as oil barrel prices go up, (ex. jump to $130/barrel, pump prices up $.10 next day, price falls to 127/barrell, prices stays where it was and does not drop accordingly, can someone explain why this happens??

Answer 1

yep, price gouging, what about how the price of oil mysteriously jumps up in the first place?

Answer 2

It is known as price gouging. It is supposed to be illegal, but no one regulates that. Torks me off as well.

Answer 3

greed

Answer 4

Because the oil companies know they can raise the price and no one can say anything about it.  Right now they are raising the prices at a phase to avoid mass rioting.

Answer 5

That has always been the case.

Gas prices will go up on a rumor, but the reduction of the price of gas never matches the pace when oil prices actually drop.

Quite a large lag time if you ask me.

Also notice that gas prices go up even though the gas you're buying was refined from oil that didnt cost as much when it was made.

Answer 6

Because prices are controlled by a small rich group of people, known as a cartel, as opposed to the free market.  When the media announces "Oil has increased", petrol stations say, "OK, we can increase prices and the public will be too stupid to note the time lag between oil being obtained and oil be processed."  Meanwhile, the UN and the media have convinced most of the population that carbon dioxide will destroy civilization so as to make people feel guilty about using petrol, making them less concerned about the price.

Then we have oil, itself, presented as a limited commodity, so as to make it more valuable, whereas carbon-based oil need not take "millions of years" to form from fossilized organic matter in sedimentary basins. For example, Batelle Laboratories in Richland, Washington State, in cooperation with American Fuel and Power Corporation produced oil from untreated (carbonaceous) sewage with properties similar to diesel oil in approximately TWO days.

The 1970s scientific study known as Hubbert's Peak, predicting we would exhaust oil reserves by 2003, has been proven false. We are currently sitting on "more proven petroleum reserves than ever before despite the increasing rate at which we are consuming petroleum products. New and gigantic oil fields are being discovered at an increasing rate, in places the fossil fuel theory would never have been predicted as possible.

According to the Energy Information Administration, "proven worldwide reserves of oil" are currently estimated at "1.28 trillion barrels, the largest amount ever recorded in human history, despite worldwide consumption of oil doubling since the 1970s"

At the World Petroleum Congress held in Johannesburg on Sept. 25-29, ExxonMobil admitted that world oil resources are so huge that they cannot be fully estimated. ExxonMobil offered their best guess, however, estimating that the level of conventional oil-in-place is today between 6 trillion and 8 trillion barrels, plus an additional 3 trillion barrels in oil shale deposits. This doesn't sound like we're going to run out of oil anytime near soon.

As Jerome Corsi points out, the environmental lobby is intent on curtailing oil use from a belief that oil consumption--and dependence on oil-driven industry and transportation--are "wrong." Said Corsi, the "anti-oil, anti-business attitude . . . feels our advanced capitalist society is . . . wasteful of the Earth's valuable natural resources."

Joining environmentalists in favoring an oil policy that artificially limits production are oil producers themselves. As Corsi's colleague and co-author Craig Smith noted, the oil industry has a "vested interest in having people believe [oil] is a very scarce commodity."

Answer 7

Price gouging is the answer to that.  The gas stations will charge the most they can for as long as the public will pay it.