YUMA, Ariz. -- U.S. motorists in the Southwest who live near the Mexican border are saving money by filling up at gas stations in Mexico. Mexico's state-owned petroleum company, Pemex, is the sole supplier of gasoline for the country's stations. Stations in San Luis Rio Colorado were selling unleaded regular gasoline last week for the equivalent of $2.87 a gallon, more than a dollar less that AAA Arizona shows is the average price of fuel in Yuma, reported the Associated Press.
Carlos Arroyos, a San Luis resident who drives a 2004 Ford Explorer, said he found out about Mexico's low gasoline [image-nocss] price through word of mouth. He said he is now saving $20 a week by filling up in Mexico.
And south of Texas, over the past year, Pemex station attendant Juan Alvarado has seen a jump in the number of motorists with U.S. license plates crossing the border the fuel up, he told The Brownsville Herald in a separate report. As of last year, he estimates that about 30% of his clients at the station, located on Calle Sexta in Matamoros, were from the United States. Now, he said, that figure sits somewhere between 60% and 70%.
Ordinarily, the price differential might not be worth crossing the border for, since a roundtrip ticket to cross the B & M International Bridge costs $4, said the report. But with gasoline in Mexico at $2.70 per gallon, compared to $3.49 in the Brownsville in late May, even after the expense of crossing the bridge, a driver with a 30-gallon tank can still save $20.
"I live in Brownsville, but I'll make a trip over here even if I only need gas," motorist Hector Cervantes told the newspaper. "I used to get gas over there, but for the past six months I've been coming here."As the world's leading shallow water oil producer, Mexico's nationalized oil company, Pemex, has long enjoyed revenue from crude exports, the report said. According to Jed Bailey, the managing director for emerging markets at Cambridge Energy Research Associates, the static prices of Mexican gasoline are dependent on a federal tax that is used to protect the country from fluctuations in global oil prices."When oil prices are low, the tax gets bigger; when oil prices get higher, the tax shrinks," he told the paper. "Part of the logic is that because the government gets so much revenue from crude sales, when oil prices are low, revenue from crude exports is also low, so the higher tax on gasoline offsets that. When oil prices are high, Pemex makes more money from their crude exports, and that money is used to help offset a lower tax on the gasoline sales within Mexico."
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