If you want cheap gas, fill up in Turkmenistan.

Over the winter break, I went home to visit my parents. During that break I only had to pay about $9 to fill up my dad's Subaru Forrester and that was filling it up from empty. Luckily I was in a country were 91 octane gasoline is at 45 cents a gallon, 95 octane gasoline is at 60 cents a gallon and diesel is 25 cents a gallon. That country would be the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This made me wonder where Saudi fuel prices compare to the rest of the world. I found a pdf. document from this site. The study surveyed 171 countries comparing both diesel and gasoline prices as of November 2006. Saudi Arabia is ranked as the 5th cheapest in terms of retail of gasoline. The cheapest goes to Turkmenistan with a price of 2 cents a liter. Venezuela is number two at 3 cents a liter. Iran and Libya complete the list. I know that Saudi gasoline is highly subsidized for the benefit of the citizens. A couple years ago, I was talking to some of my friends about how cheap the gas is, I came to the realization that gasoline is actually cheaper than water. One liter of gasoline is about 12 cents a liter, while a liter of bottled water is about 25 cents. It is quite a different world in Saudi when it comes to worrying about gasoline prices, which is nonexistent. Everybody there drives big cars and SUV's. In fact, Saudi Arabia is the number one importer of Toyota Land Cruisers in the world. A little fun in the sand serves as one popular pastime, next to break dancing and running over pedestrians (sometimes I wish I was being sarcastic). When I am there, I forget about the rising prices of oil. In Saudi, not too many people would really care about the price of oil. In fact, if they did, they would be very happy to see prices rise which could mean that some of that wealth could trickle down. Most of the citizens of Saudi live in a bubble of an oil utopia.

Coming back to the list of gasoline prices, I just want to quickly list out the countries with the most expensive gasoline. Number one goes to Eritrea, at 190 cents a liter. Number two is Iceland with 186 cents a gallon and number three goes to Norway at 180 cents a gallon. Obviously there are other factors to look at when comparing these prices such as the cost of living at each of these countries. It is quite interesting to see how big the range is for the price gasoline (from 2 cents to 190 cents a liter). To put these numbers in perspective, the study stated that the price of gasoline in the U.S. was at 63 cents a liter.