Can anyone give me a comparison of gas (petrol) prices between Europe and the U.S., in U.S. dollars from twenty and ten years ago, as well as current?

http://www.speedlimit.org.uk/petrolprices.html


Since that was written in April the price has risen. In the provinces it is 89 pence a litre and has reached £1 in some expensive parts of London.

There are 3.8 litres (3.785) to a US gallon.

The gallons in that list are UK ones; an American gallon is 0.83 of the, now non-existent, gallon in Britain

http://www.oanda.com gives exchange rates both current and historic

89 pence a litre is $6. 12 a US gallon at today's rate

Mainland European prices are pretty much the same as ours. There is no official agreement on prices but common sense dictates that there is a parity.If it were otherwise, everyone within reach of them would be crossing the national borders to stock up on fuel; next thing would be a black market supplied by road tankers running cross-border

My guess is, that gasoline costs are pretty much common around the world. I think that the price per gallon difference is caused by taxes. Am I right?

quote:

Originally posted by edgeview:
My guess is, that gasoline costs are pretty much common around the world. I think that the price per gallon difference is caused by taxes. Am I right?

To a large degree.

The UK, to most people's surprise, is a petroleum exporter. On the financial pages you may read of oil prices for 'Brent crude'; that's oil from Britain's North Sea oilfields. We have the cheapest petrol/ gasoline in Europe at base cost i.e before refining, distribution and marketing.

But we tax the fuel heavily. The tax element is complex and varies about 65% to 78% because there is a tax of a fixed sum per litre plus a fixed percentage tax. It is accounting for 67% of the pump price here in Britain this year, according to the AA.

In the USA typically the tax element is only 21% [Source US Department of Energy ] If you took the tax off the British price the fuel would be somewhere about 29,5 pence a litre. That's 54c a litre and so $2-05c a gallon American. That base cost would represent 79% of the pump price in the USA, so the pump price with tax is c $2-60c. (These are approximate figures; I can't say exactly at what price this year the petrol was when the source, the Automobile Association, said the tax represented 67% )

Other countries in Europe also tax heavily, though Britain is among the heaviest taxers.

If you lived in Venezuela you'd be paying about 12c a gallon. In Egypyt it's a dizzy 62c. That's because these countries have access to very cheap crude and also the government likes to encourage the people by cheap fuel. The governments of such places often hold total control of the oil, by state ownership of oil companies or other monopolistic practices.

When I worked in Abu Dhabi bottled drinking water was substantially dearer than petrol/gas... ...thank goodness I rarely drank water...