No matter how far you travel outside the Permian Basin, once people find out you're from the area the topic of gas and oil will almost always come up in conversation.  We literally have oil running underneath our feet, yet we seem to pay more at the pumps than most other parts of Texas.

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One would think since oil is so close and accessible, that we would have some of the lowest prices in the country. However, that is far from the truth.

At the time of this article, according to GasBuddy the average price of a gallon of gas is sitting roughly around $2.69 in the Permian Basin.

Rough Estimate Of Gas Prices Around Texas

 

San Antonio: $2.35

Austin: $2.21

Texas City: $2.15

On average, regions like the Permian Basin, Corpus Christi, and Houston all seem to have higher-than-average gas prices despite providing the lion's share of oil throughout the entire state.

How does something like this even happen?  You would think shipping gasoline to areas of Texas that are further away from refineries and oil facilities would have higher prices due to the fact that it takes more fuel and resources for the gas and oil to reach them.

Granted, there may be a perfectly good explanation as to why this is.  However, coming from someone from the outside looking in, one would think we would have even slightly better prices versus cities in Texas in the middle of nowhere.    Unfortunately, that does not appear to be so. 

LOOK: See how much gasoline cost the year you started driving

To find out more about how has the price of gas changed throughout the years, Stacker ran the numbers on the cost of a gallon of gasoline for each of the last 84 years. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (released in April 2020), we analyzed the average price for a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline from 1976 to 2020 along with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for unleaded regular gasoline from 1937 to 1976, including the absolute and inflation-adjusted prices for each year.

Read on to explore the cost of gas over time and rediscover just how much a gallon was when you first started driving.

Gallery Credit: Sophia Crisafulli

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