The price of a barrel of crude closed at $74.09 today. Yee haw.

However, while rising crude oil prices are bad enough, this has also been a bad week for jet fuel prices too, as I mentioned in this week’s PBB. NY Jet closed at $2.16/gallon on Thursday, and I doubt it dropped back much today, although I have yet to check.

And no, jet fuel and crude don’t always move in the same direction. Why? Because of the cost to refine jet fuel. A number of factors enter into this. The metric that is used to tell us just how expensive it is to refine a barrel of crude is called the crack spread.

As a result, sometimes the price of jet fuel dips below rising oil prices, sometimes it tracks the price of crude fairly closely. Other times — it tracks above the price of crude.