We’ve been hearing a lot of complaints about the high price of gasoline so I wanted to get a sense of how efficient the gasoline refining industry is. The price of a barrel of crude is about $65 per. There are 42 gallons of oil in a barrel, which means that it costs a refining company about $1.55 for a gallon of crude oil. We are paying about $3.10 per gallon of gasoline at the pump right now. This means that the company that we buy our gasoline from is somehow able to transport that gallon of oil to a refinery, refine it into a gallon of gasoline (paying all the costs associated with that), transport it to a storage facility somewhere near Raleigh, NC, transport it to a gas station, sell it for a $1.55 more than it cost them for the crude, subtract 48 cents for state a federal taxes, and still earn a profit. Damn! That’s efficiency.