Fuel Price Spike Has Diverse Impact By County, New OPIS Study Shows

WALL, N.J.--U.S. gasoline prices have soared some 90cts gal higher than they’ve ever been in November, and are double the price that consumers paid just five years ago. But a just released study by Oil Price Information Service shows that the devil is in the details, with huge variations between individual U.S. counties.

The OPIS study mapped detailed specific retail prices for gas against individual county-by-county median household income. In the aggregate, it now costs about 3.8% of the median household income to operate just one vehicle compared with 1.9% in 2002. But there are huge differences between counties and states.

For example, the Southeast and the Midwest have seen the largest additional cost burdens on their respective populations. About 4.6% of average household spending in the Southeast now goes to pay for one vehicle’s fuel, and that number is 4.2% for the Midwest. In both cases, the five year increase is about 90% from the same costs in 2002. Fuel budgets per vehicle have increased in the Northeast by 86% since 2002, but a far smaller percentage of household income goes to purchase gasoline. Households in Mid-Atlantic and New England states, for example, are spending about 2.8% of their income on fuel per vehicle, a rate that is about 62% below the southeastern number.

The just released OPIS study compares current gas prices, estimated vehicles miles traveled as reported by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, and estimated median income as published by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Wilcox County, Alabama is at one end of the extremes. The OPIS data study finds that residents of this county have the greatest pain at the pump - - an average household there spent 12.7% of income to fuel a single family vehicle. Second on the misery list was Holmes County, MS where 12.2% of household budgets is required to fuel up a car, and a number of Kentucky counties were also high on the list.

Rank	ST	County	2007 Estimated % of Income Per Vehicle Spent on Fuel	2002 Estimated % of Income Per Vehicle Spent on Fuel
1	AL	Wilcox	12.72%	5.85%
2	MS	Holmes	12.18%	6.24%
3	KY	Owsley	11.85%	5.37%
4	MS	Jefferson	11.31%	NA
5	KY	Clay	11.23%	5.03%

At the other extreme were some of the well heeled counties of New Jersey, where rising fuel prices don’t have quite the same sting as other portions of the country. Thanks to a combination of some of the lowest gas prices in the country and a high median income, Hunterdon County, NJ residents spend about 1.5% of current budgets on gas per vehicle. Putnam County NY is next in line, followed by a number of other downstate N.Y. and N.J. counties.

Rank	ST	County	2007 Estimated % of Income Per Vehicle Spent on Fuel	2002 Estimated % of Income Per Vehicle Spent on Fuel
1	NJ	Hunterdon	1.52%	0.77%
2	NY	Putnam	1.58%	0.88%
3	NJ	Morris	1.60%	0.82%
4	NJ	Somerset	1.60%	0.85%
5	NY	Nassau	1.60%	0.87%

In all, the ten least painful counties all saw fuel costs that didn’t exceed 1.85% of household income per vehicle. In contrast, the most fuel-stressed counties often saw more than 10% of household budgets go for fueling one car.

To download the complete “OPIS Pain at the Pump” rankings for over 3,000 counties follow this link: http://www.opisnet.com/retail/painindex.asp.

OPIS is the leading provider of real-time gasoline prices to portable and automotive navigation device manufactures, cell phone application developers and web portals. OPIS updates prices at more than 100,000 stations each day allowing consumers to find the most affordable price along a given rout or in a radius around a certain point. OPIS real-time retail gasoline prices can be found in products offered by AAA, Microsoft, Garmin, Dash Navigation, Telenav and many more.

Nearly every major and traditional brand is represented including, Shell, BP, Conoco, Valero, Chevron, Phillips 66, Tesoro, Hess, LUKoil, Irving, Marathon and more as well as most private new era marketers such as Wawa, Sheetz, QuikTrip, Maverik, Speedway, Safeway, HEB, Kroger, Murphy USA and many others. To license a feed of OPIS Real-Time prices call Fred Rozell at 732.730.2568 or e-mail mailto:frozell@opisnet.com

ABOUT OPIS

Oil Price Information Service (OPIS) [http://www.opisnet.com] is the most widely accepted fuel price benchmark for supply contracts and competitive positioning. It’s used as the benchmark price by the world to buy and sell U.S. gasoline, diesel, ethanol, biodiesel, LP-gas, jet fuel, crude, propane, feedstocks, resid, and kerosene. Through its subsidiary, Axxis Software, it also provides leading-edge software solutions for petroleum marketers looking to automate price collection, data storage and repricing of dealer and commercial accounts. OPIS is a private, independent publication not associated with managing investments.