Crude oil price variability and its impact on ethanol prices

The world annual biofuel production has exceeded 100 billion litres in 2009. The development of the biofuel production is partly influenced by the government support programs and partly by the development of oil prices. The main purpose of this paper is to analyze the statistical relationship between ethanol, gasoline and crude oil prices. We aim to check the correlation among these variables and to analyze the strength and direction of a possible linear relationship among the variables. We are interested in analyzing how each variable is related to another, so we evaluate the inter-relationship among the variables in the Vector Autoregression (VAR) and the Impulse Response Function (IRF). In order to achieve our goal, we first collected weekly data for each variable from January, 2000 to October, 2009. The results provide evidence of the cointegration relationship between oil and gasoline prices, but no cointegration between ethanol, gasoline and ethanol, oil prices. As a result, we used a VAR model on first differences. After running the Impulse Response Function, we found out that the impact of the oil price shock on the other variables is considerable larger than vice versa. The largest impact of oil price shock was observed on the price of gasoline.