I was originally interested in knowing when we might hit $4 gasoline, or what gasoline would cost at $100 oil.

Here's the deal - I keep very close track of average gasoline and oil prices(in the US) as most of you know. In fact I make my own averages out of daily prices. So the numbers are cool.

So it's a simple plot with excel. You match a week's oil price with the price of retail gasoline. Two columns. I use raw numbers and moving averages, I can manipulate them any way I want, and I do, and I found there wasn't much difference in this particular case, so I just stuck with my four-week averages. You can see in the one how the pink correlation, which was one shift variation I used doesn't really differ too much from the blue. In fact, I removed the pink trendline in that case because it almost perfectly overlapped the shown blue one. In other words, the dots may be in different places, the trends are not.

Then I let excel draw what it calls a "trendline" through the datapoints. This is the line in the middle.

I then used the drawing function in Excel to copy that line (twice) and moved those copied lines north and south and extended them to form what looks like the barrel of a gun.

I moved those parallel "outriggers" to just about the outer bounds of where the known points lay. I don't know if they hold the key to the future.

I did one graph with data from Jan 2002 to present and one from Jan 2004 to present.

The best part about these two graphs and why they are two of my favorites is the fact that they work for me.

Or should that be fission trip?

CEO - nice charts - I've grabbed both for my TOD folder that now has so much stuff in I can't find anything.

I'm working on a post on demand destruction - so here's the $50,000 question - at what gasoline price do Americans stop driving, start sharing, trade down to SUVs from Hummers.  Where is the pain threshold?

And here's the fishing part - how about doing the same for the UK (I can hear you howling).

There is an interesting paradox about the different tax regimes in Europe and the US.  In the US you have low tax, burn gas like there is no tomorrow, but when the price of crude goes up you get the full force at the gas pump - I think your blue line shows a 1:1 correlation - did xl really draw that?

In Europe, we have a lot more tax and this acts to de-gear the price rises at the pump - so crude prices will have to go a lot higher before we begin to howl.  In other words there may be different demand destruction regimes in the US and Europe.

UK premium "petrol" is around £1 / litre right now - that's $7 / US gallon (this sum has been checked by all members of my family apart from the dogs).

So here'e the potentially clever part.  Higher prices in Europe are compensated for by normally smaller more fuel efficient cars.  So on average, does it cost the same for Europeans and Americans to drive 100 miles?