Amrith Ramkumar

speaker

860 appearances 16 recordings 1 series first heard May 2018 last heard Sep 2021

Amrith Ramkumar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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WSJ Your Money Briefing · Gas Prices: What's Behind Regional Price Differences? · 24 Oct 2019 podcast

So there are not that many facilities that can process oil and turn it into the crude or into the gasoline that's the quality needed to meet California's emission standards. matched

Other issues include, again, like different gas tax policies. matched

So California has high gas taxes and, again, different patterns of driving. matched

So there are so many factors, and they've all kind of coalesced this fall on the West Coast. matched

Exactly. matched

You hit the nail on the head. matched

So in the fall, typically refineries do shut down because gasoline demands tend to decline during this part of the calendar year and tends to peak in the summer. matched

But again, when you have these expected outages and then a few unexpected things on top of that, that can really cause a lot of gasoline price volatility for consumers at the pump. matched

And that's what we're seeing. matched

So even though it's easy for people to say generally lower oil prices this year have lowered the national averages, that's why we're seeing these huge pricing gaps across America. matched

Generally, prices are higher in big urban areas that have higher gas taxes. matched

So a dozen states this year, earlier in the year, raised gas taxes, including Illinois and Michigan and Maryland were among them, too. matched

So a lot of these states are trying to raise more money for local infrastructure projects like roads, bridges, et cetera. matched

So that can be a big factor driving gaps as well. matched

Well, they basically limit the number of refineries in the U.S. matched

that can make the gasoline that the state needs. matched

So that really cuts off the number of sources it can use to get gasoline. matched

So when there are shortages, it's not as easy as it is in other parts of the country to just get it from somewhere else. matched

So it's a very complicated network. matched

And again, to begin with, there are a limited number of pipelines and refineries going to that part of the country. matched

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