In practice our prices are down a good bit (20%?).

I paid $1.89 today in beautiful Columbia South Carolina.

Yeah 0.94 CAD today. I forgot it can go below a dollar.

The US people are talking about per gallon and you are likely quoting per liter.

I am. I'm not trying to make a comparison to parent. Just that I've not seen it below a dollar in a long time.

Still damn near 4 dollars here in California.

In order to make gas legal to sell in CA, it requires a special formulation and additives. Refineries have to be specially configured to produce it, so CA will almost always be more due to the smaller amount of refinery capacity dedicated to producing it. And that isn't even taking into account the various CA taxes and fees on gas that add up to nearly 50 cents a gallon.

We end up with oxygenated gas that supposedly produces 10% lower emissions per unit volume.

But it has 11-13% less energy per gallon, so one burns 11-13% more gallons to travel the same distance.

Prices in my nearby Costco stores are $3.09 and $3.05. The highest price I've seen in my general area is $3.75. If you drive around a lot it might be worth considering a subscription to Costco; depending on your usage it might pay for itself pretty quickly.

CA is an odd duck both because of its taxes and regulations, and because the oil produces in middle America do not flow by pipeline there. So CA pays the higher international price for their crude oil.

How do you like living there?

4 US dollars per gallon in China.

if the output is the same but America's cut is greater... doesn't that mean it's a net positive for the US? More US gas = more US profit? Seems like a win to me...

More profit for US oil companies, but as a massive consumer of oil and oil derived products it means higher prices than necessary across many large sectors of the economy.

Yes: good for American oil producers; indifferent for American oil consumers.

Even for American oil consumers, doesn’t fewer imports imply an expectation of greater stability going forward, since the price is more dependent upon just this country’s happenings, and less dependent on the happenings inside other countries?

Or can it be argued either way, e.g. that if the production was spread over more countries the prices would be less dependent on any one country in isolation?

>it seems it's a net loss for the consumers How is it a net loss for consumers that Americans continue to get subsidised gas? If you had to pay even less it would have been a huge loss for the environment. It is about time that you start to pay the real price for gas including the environmental cost for the emissions

It's good news environmentally. The more expensive gas is the less we burn.

Environmentally we should stop using gas, import and export. It’s been said for 40+ years and instead we’re celebrating these news

This is a misconception. Over time, OPEC actually LOWERS prices, not raises them. This is because oil has lag time from investment to production, so it has natural boom/bust cycles. If there was no moderator akin to a central bank, producers would eventually be knocked out of the market and set the stage for prices to rise to marginal benefit. Producers need reduced price volatility to make decisions, and also some producers have higher costs and cannot survive in low price environments.

We saw something like this is 2008 where oil rose to $140/barrel and people still paid that price. This can happen again once shale growth levels, and years of underinvestment in expensive oils like deepwater and oil sands bite.

Sorry, but once again Trump doesn't know what he is talking about. He majorly F'd the OPEC countries and allies by telling them he'd sanction Iran and then pulling back on it after they invested in production. You cannot simply turn on and off the taps for oil, and he doesn't understand that. OPEC had no choice but to plan a cut or else the market would have driven more into bankruptcy.

Edit: Also a fun fact - US shale oil primarily produces gasoline, so even if OPEC cuts we still have adequate supply of gasoline. But actually prices for gas aren't down much because of added taxes. The Saudi oil minister actually commented on that this week, that it is unfair that they helped consumers by increasing production (as Trump requested) but when crude prices fall governments fill the gap with taxes.