How does the barrel price of oil equate to increases at the gas pump?

Is there some sort of rough estimate forumla? Two days ago the Yahoo headline said oil had reached a new high of over $129.00. Now today it's over $132.00.





So how much will the average price of gas go up because of this? Does a $3.00 barrel increase mean a 30-cent increase at the pump or something? And what is the lag time? How long does it take for the barrel increase to effect the gas increase?How does the barrel price of oil equate to increases at the gas pump?
There are 42 gal of oil in a barrel It takes between 1.5 and 2 gal of oil to make a gal of gas. depending on the refining process and type of oil. At a $120 that is about $3 per gal of oil but other products such as heating oil can be made from the residue . Another way to look at it is that the $100 increase in the price of oil from $20 to $120 increased the price of gas about $2.50 a gallon.How does the barrel price of oil equate to increases at the gas pump?
it doesn't really matter BC they will do what they want and the reason gas is going up is these rich sob's can charge us what they want and all they have to do is line a few pockets in government
That has nothing to do with it. All this is just smoke and mirrors to hide the fact that big oil and governments are lining their pockets.
Well the crude oil market is a futures market for making a contract for delivery of crude oil by a certain date at an agreed upon price. Right now the earliest date to buy for is July 2008. It's tough to just look at crude prices and come up with an easy formula of the corresponding gas price and the delay time, because there are many market factors on gasoline independently. Also you don't get a gallon of gas out of a gallon of crude, but all the byproducts are useful and are sold, so we can roughly estimate that it evens out.





But to give you a good idea, the tax on gas in the US is 47 cents on average, and you can add about another 68-70 cents for refining and other costs. So with average US prices being about 3.80 right now, you'd be looking for roughly $110/barrel oil using that very rough estimate (excluding all other factors). Oil was this price in early April. So I suppose that means you can look back 1-1.5 months to get an idea.





If we were to apply this right now with oil being $135/barrel, it would indicate prices of about $4.35/gal ($4.50 in CA due to 15 cents higher tax) at the end of June / beginning of July. Again, there are a lot of factors having to do with supply/demand/refining of the actual gasoline and the price of crude fluctuates a lot, but I suspect we will see these sorts of gas prices in the near future.





If, God forbid, crude oil rises to the $200/barrel level as some analysts have predicted in the longer term, we would see gas prices of $6.00/gal across the US.