Heating oil is significantly cheaper.

And the price of diesel fuel, which is closely related to production, has also fallen noticeably.

This is also remarkable because the sharp rise in prices had previously been interpreted as fear of a winter with considerable heating difficulties.

Since the beginning of October, the price of heating oil has fallen from almost 170 to around 138 euros per 100 liters.

The Internet portal Heizoel24, to which more than 500 oil traders report their prices, cites, among other things, the well-stocked gas storage tanks as a reason for the calming of the market - as well as the many ships with liquid gas still waiting off Europe's coasts.

Christian Siedenbiedel

Editor in Business.

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Diesel at the filling station has also become cheaper, while at the same time the unusually large difference in price compared to premium fuel has shrunk somewhat again.

As the ADAC car club reports in its weekly analysis of the prices of more than 14,000 petrol stations, the price of diesel has fallen by 5.1 cents to an average of 2.065 euros per liter within a week.

At the same time, the price of premium petrol has risen by 3.7 cents to 1.910 euros per liter.

This means that the difference between diesel and premium prices has fallen by at least 8.8 cents, from more than 24 to 15.5 cents per liter.

Apparently there were even individual gas stations where diesel was cheaper than Super, at least at certain times of the day.

"At best, the beginning of a normalization"

The high price of heating oil and the exceptional gap between diesel and super prices had previously been symptoms of the crisis.

Various factors came together: Right at the beginning of the Ukraine war, the price of diesel had risen because Germany had previously purchased significant quantities of diesel and precursors directly from Russia.

Later, the tank discount meant that diesel was more expensive than premium because the tax on premium fuel was reduced more.

In any case, the mineral oil companies had recently argued that many companies in Germany, which normally use natural gas in their production but could also use heating oil instead, stocked up on heating oil as a precaution because they feared gas shortages or high prices for natural gas.

That drove the demand for heating oil and the price.

The exciting question now: is there an all-clear signal on the energy market at the moment – ​​or is it just the calm before the storm?

In any case, Jürgen Albrecht, a fuel specialist at ADAC, says: "One can assume that professional players in the companies in particular have already largely taken their precautions in the event of a lack of or completely overpriced gas quantities." Switch” from gas to oil, which had recently bought heating oil and thus stimulated the already not exactly low demand at the beginning of the heating period, do not have unlimited storage options.

In any case, the price of crude oil is not the main reason for the fall in the price of heating oil and diesel.

When the OPEC plus oil association decided to cut production in October, the price of the North Sea variety Brent rose and has hovered around $95 per barrel (159 liter barrel) ever since.

In the meantime there has been minor turbulence: a week ago the price was 95 dollars, has meanwhile risen to almost 100 dollars and is now “approximately the same as the previous week”, as the ADAC emphasizes.

The Autoklub calls it “still remarkable” that diesel is so much more expensive than Super on average across Germany.

The tax for diesel is a good 20 cents per liter below that for super.

That's why diesel had been cheaper than Super all those years before the outbreak of the Ukraine war.

The current development, according to the ADAC, could "at most be the beginning of a normalization".

An important factor for the recently somewhat lower prices for heating oil and diesel was certainly the falling gas price, says Frank Schallenberger, raw materials specialist at Landesbank Baden-Württemberg: "This should have led to the gas-to-oil switch again becoming significantly declined,” the analyst points out.

In other words, the replacement of gas by oil in the economy as a whole, which was strongly driven by the high price of gas, has not continued at the same rate.

Schallenberger also believes that the somewhat more relaxed situation at the refineries is causing lower margins.

The mild weather and the comparatively high temperatures have apparently also recently caused demand for both gas and heating oil to be lower than would otherwise have been the case.

Commerzbank calculated that October was almost 3 degrees warmer than usual.

Adjusted for this effect, gas consumption was hardly lower than a year ago, writes Commerzbank chief economist Jörg Krämer on the news service Twitter.

The Federal Network Agency has calculated two scenarios as to how the gas will continue.

Klaus Müller, the president of the agency, describes it like this: "In a normal winter, we can get by with the known savings needs and new North Sea and Baltic Sea LNG terminals," he says.

"But a cold winter and a cold wave, such as the one experienced in February 2012, could cause considerable difficulties." In any case, it is too early to give the all-clear.