something to consider
From April 2008 Car and Driver Csaba Csere's article on Diesel Price Increase and America:
Article title is: (this is an excerpt)
Should American Vehicles go Diesel Just When the World is Running Short of it?
The advantage of a diesel is half what it once was. Is it likely to be further eroded over the next few years? According to Ron Planting, an economist at the American Petroleum Institute (API), most of the world’s rapidly growing economies, such as China’s and India’s, use more diesel and less gasoline from each barrel of oil than we do in America, where 40 to 45 percent of each barrel ends up being refined into gasoline. Although the energy demand of these growing economies is one of the causes of today’s record-high crude-oil prices, that growth is putting even greater pressure on the world’s diesel supplies.
The arrival of low-sulfur regulations has also added a few cents to the price of a gallon of diesel due to the more complex refining process required to extract the sulfur.
Basic economics dictates that when one commodity has higher demand than another, its price will rise faster, and that’s exactly what we’ve seen with diesel fuel and gasoline. So why don’t the oil companies simply produce more diesel than gasoline from each barrel of crude oil? Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as twisting a few dials at the world’s oil refineries.
Al Mannato, a fuel-issues manager at API, explains that oil refineries tend to fall into two categories: catalytic cracking and hydrocracking. Most U.S. refineries are set up for catalytic cracking, which turns each barrel of crude oil into about 50-percent gasoline, 15-percent diesel, and the remainder into jet fuel, home heating oil, heavy fuel oil, liquefied petroleum gas, asphalt, and various other products. In Europe and most of the rest of the world, refineries use a hydrocracking process, which produces more like 25-percent gasoline and 25-percent diesel from that barrel of oil. So the rest of the world is already maximizing diesel production. In fact, despite using a refining strategy that minimizes the production of gasoline, Europe still ends up with too much of the stuff, so it exports it to America—about one of every eight gallons of gasoline that we consume.
Meanwhile, Americans are already using most of the diesel fuel that our refineries produce, so if sales of diesel cars take off, keeping the diesel flowing here will put further demands on tight worldwide diesel supplies and probably cause the price to rise even more. Our oil industry could, of course, start converting its refineries from catalytic to hydrocracking and start producing more diesel and less gasoline.
Its a very interesting read on why diesel costs more and why most think its going to stay more and get worse.
Marcus
And don't tell me it's because more people are buying diesel driven vehicles... the ratio between gas & diesel vehicles is still very significant.
