Crude Oil & Gas Prices: Futures Prices Equalized

 

A barrel of oil is 42 gallons.

Bloomberg has oil prices as “NYMEX CRUDE FUTURE 45.76” dollars/barrel

Bloomberg has Gasoline as: “NYMEX RBOB GASOLINE FUTURE 128.54” cents/gallon

The conversion of oil is to divide price 42 gallons to get the dollar price of oil. Doing so we get a price of $1.0895238. The conversion to cents per gallon is accomplished by dividing by 100. Doing so we get 108.95 cents per gallon of NYMEX Crude.

NYMEX CRUDE FUTURE price is = 108.95 cents per gallon

NYMEX RBOB GASOLINE FUTURE price is 128.54 cents per gallon

There are two ways of looking at this. Either gasoline is more expensive or oil is cheaper. The one that is probably more correct is gasoline as % more than oil. This is likely the case because gasoline is refined from crude oil. The price of gasoline reflects the cost of refining into a product that has few end uses. Crude oil can be made into many different products.

Moving on… Formula: Change in price / base.

RBOB Gasoline is 17.98% more than crude oil on a per gallon basis.

OR

NYMEX Crude oil is 15.24% less than gasoline on a per gallon basis.

SOURCE: Bloomberg Retrieved: 3/11/2009