change in brent crude and lahore gasoline prices in 2014

Oil prices have fallen worldwide.  I wanted to see how much of that drop is reflected in the price I pay for gasoline at the pump.  Is the cost of filling my tank dropping at the same rate as crude oil?

Summary: calculated against January 1, 2014's prices, on January 2, 2015 the drop in crude is 49.08% and the drop in my local prices 30.48%.

I downloaded the Brent crude prices for Jan 1 2014 to Jan 2 2015, and grabbed the fields I wanted:

$ awk -F, 'BEGIN { OFS="," } { print $1, $5}' ~/Downloads/CHRIS-ICE_B1.csv  | tail -r > crude.csv
$ head crude.csv
2014-01-01,110.8
2014-01-02,107.78
2014-01-03,106.89
2014-01-06,106.73
2014-01-07,107.35
2014-01-08,107.15
2014-01-09,106.39
2014-01-10,107.25
2014-01-13,106.75
2014-01-14,106.39
$ 

There are several gas stations on my way to work, but only two Shell stations that I can get to without making a U-turn.  For the local gasoline prices, I visited the regulator (OGRA)'s site and grabbed the prices for Shell.  I saved the PDF files and did

for i in *.pdf; do
  pdftops $i - 2>/dev/null | ps2ascii - ${i%pdf}txt
  echo done with $i
done

pdftops ships with xpdf and ps2ascii with Ghostscript.  It's not a perfect process, but close enough:

$ grep 'LINK FILLING STATION LAHORE MODEL TOWN LINK ROAD' *.txt
1388983409-201401.txt:386 LINK FILLING STATION LAHORE MODEL TOWN LINK ROAD 113.25 117.24 na
1391506062-201402.txt:383 LINK FILLING STATION LAHORE MODEL TOWN LINK ROAD 113.25 117.24 na
1393998747-201403.txt:383 LINK FILLING STATION LAHORE MODEL TOWN LINK ROAD 110.52 117.24 na
1396419125-201404.txt:384 LINK FILLING STATION LAHORE MODEL TOWN LINK ROAD 108.80 114.34 na
1399270867-201405.txt:385 LINK FILLING STATION LAHORE MODEL TOWN LINK ROAD 108.45 109.82 na
1401789424-201406.txt:385 LINK FILLING STATION LAHORE MODEL TOWN LINK ROAD 108.44 109.81 na
1404290583-201407.txt:385 LINK FILLING STATION LAHORE MODEL TOWN LINK ROAD 108.44 109.81 na
1407392347-201408.txt:386 LINK FILLING STATION LAHORE MODEL TOWN LINK ROAD 108.44 109.81 na
1409731282-201409.txt:LINK FILLING STATION LAHORE MODEL TOWN LINK ROAD 107.03 108.81 naLOKARI FILLING STATION BHALWAL 9 BHALWAL KOT MOMIN ROAD 107.34 109.12 na
1412235166-201410.txt:386 LINK FILLING STATION LAHORE MODEL TOWN LINK ROAD 104.09 107.86 n/a
1415185107-201411.txt:387 LINK FILLING STATION LAHORE MODEL TOWN LINK ROAD 94.66 101.68 n/a
1417519204-201412.txt:LINK FILLING STATION LAHORE MODEL TOWN LINK ROAD 84.99 94.55 n/a
1420218912-201501.txt:LINK FILLING STATION LAHORE MODEL TOWN LINK ROAD 78.73 86.68 n/a
$ 

The first column of figures is what I want.

Combining the local prices with the crude oil prices, I get a simple spreadsheet, and voila:



The figures seem to show a large gap between changes to local prices and Brent crude (no surprise there).  Calculated against January 1, 2014's prices, on January 2, 2015 the drop in crude is 49.08% and the drop in local prices 30.48%.

Disclaimer:

• While crude oil is priced in dollars and gasoline in rupees, I'm looking at the daily change in percentage terms, with the base set to January 1, 2014's prices.  I don't think the exchange rate has changed much in the past year.
• Since OGRA's PDF files don't tell me when the gasoline prices went into effect, I'm going to assume the first working day of each month.
• I don't know the exact cost of importing crude (or refined) oil to Pakistan.  The Brent crude price might not be all that relevant here.  However, this post is about investigating my perception of how much the price has dropped, based on what I see in the news and what I see at the gas pump.
• This looks at the prices for just one company's gas station -- the one I frequent.  Other gas stations, located closer to the port of Karachi or local refineries, might show a larger drop.

(edited on January 25, 2015 to add a summary and fix a typo)