Oil

Benchmark Crude Oil Prices

It must have been back around the start of 2011 that gasoline jumped to $4 a gallon, and the beginning of this year that it dropped back down to $3 a gallon.

Refineries in the United States produced an average of about 12 gallons  of diesel fuel and 19 gallons of gasoline from one barrel (42 gallons) of crude oil in 2013. - U.S. Energy Information Administration

 So, 31 gallons of fuel (12 + 19) and 11 gallons of what-not. 31 times $4 is $124, and 31 time $3 is $91, so the graph and history match up. Since oil does not produce, transport, or refine itself, somebody has to do it, and those people want to get paid. Since the fuel barely covers the price of the oil, the 11 gallons of what-not is paying for the refining and distribution. And taxes. Don't forget taxes:

Sign in convenience store window, somewhere on the road to Iowa.

Via Dustbury, the glittering eye and Knoema dot com

Knoema also has the production costs for several oil producing countries. The weird part is that almost all of them are higher, sometimes much higher, than the current market price. Something's gotta give.

Update September 2018 replaced embedded graph that had gone missing with screen shot and link.