In fact, Utah's five refineries produce more than a billion gallons of gasoline each year. Additionally, a pipeline from Wyoming refineries has a terminal in Woods Cross that supplies the equivalent of another refinery's worth of gasoline locally. That is enough to supply Utah's needs from Intermountain sources, said Lee J. Peacock, president of the Utah Petroleum Association.

About three-fourths of the crude oil that supplies local refineries comes from Utah and nearby states, and about 25 percent comes from tar sands in Alberta, Canada, Peacock says.

In comparison nationally, the EIA says 66 percent of the crude oil used nationwide in 2005 was imported from abroad.

Peacock says gasoline is cheap enough here that sometimes it is economical for distant distributors to send trucks here to haul it back. (A gasoline truck that crashed and exploded last month in Spanish Fork Canyon was doing that.)

Such long-distance shipping when gas is cheap here tends to increase local demand and prices — so Peacock said prices tend to even out nationally over time.

Commodity pricing

So why isn't Utah gasoline even cheaper if it doesn't come from the Middle East and was not directly affected by hurricane damage?

"Oil is a commodity. We (oil companies) don't set the price, but we respond to it. It's a complicated system," Peacock says.

"The price is set in the market by traders who look at all types of things in setting the price of the commodity. Some of it is rational, and some of it is not, just like any other commodity," from the price of gold to wheat futures, he says.

Those factors could include worry that potential war in the Middle East could limit production, making traders bid higher for other crude to ensure they have adequate future supplies. Concerns could come about continuing hurricane damage or increased demand for oil in places such as India and China.

Or, especially, traders may respond to production limitation by Third World suppliers.

An Energy Information Administration report on gasoline pricing says, for example, that "OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) has tried to keep world oil prices at its target level by setting an upper production limit on its members" to keep demand and prices high. It sees OPEC as one of the price villains.

It adds, "OPEC has the potential to influence oil prices worldwide because its members possess . . . about 40 percent of the world's production of crude oil and (hold) more than two-thirds of the world's estimated crude oil reserves."

The Federal Trade Commission in a 2005 investigation into gasoline prices said, "The world price of crude oil is the most important factor in the price of gasoline. Over the last 20 years, changes in (world) crude oil prices have explained 85 percent of the changes in the price of gasoline in the United States."