When I was growing up, diesel was always considered the greener option than petrol, and this was reflected in the prices, diesel always cost less because it was taxed at a lower rate.
Now they say it’s worse than petrol and prices are now higher for diesel.
So what changed, or what did we suddenly learn about diesel that we didn’t know before?
Bonus question, considering they’re both made from crude oil, what’s the difference in how they’re refined?
In: Chemistry
You’d need a chemist to back me up on this (or correct me if I’m misinformed) but I was told years ago that the refining process for gasoline/petrol is more expensive than the process for diesel, so diesel was cheaper.
More recently, though, apparently chemists found some profitable uses for by-products leftover after gasoline/petrol production. You don’t get all these useful by-products from producing diesel, so refiners started charging more for diesel, since selling it meant they were missing out on the extra sales they would get for other products when refining gasoline.
Supposedly (in the USA, at least) taxes had nothing to do with it.
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