As crude oil prices fall will we see petrol at a pound a litre? Brent crude plunges to 18-year low as oil slump rattles markets Brent crude, sourced from the North Sea, has plunged today. The cost of a barrel of Brent in cuurently around US$22.25 down 67% from US$68 at the end of 2019. Posted: 200421 Reports say the price of US oil has turned negative for the first time in history. That means oil producers are paying buyers to take the commodity off their hands over fears that storage capacity could run out in May. Demand for oil has all but dried up as a consequence of the C-19 lockdowns across the World which have kept people inside and reduced traffic movements dramatically. More As a result, oil firms have resorted to renting tankers to store the surplus supply and that has forced the price of US oil into negative territory. The price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate (WTI), the benchmark for US oil, fell as low as minus US$37.63 a barrel. What is the breakdown of the cost of fuel? In the UK and other similar economies the taxation on motor fuels is high. In the UK there is fuel duty which is 57.95p/litre and there is VAT on both the cost of fuel and the duty. As the price of fuel falls to a pound a litre the UK tax take increases as a share of the UK retail price. Fuel duty has been frozen until the end of the 2021 - that was announced in the Budget on 11th March 2020. This means that fuel duty will have been frozen for at least nine years; the longest freeze for more than 40 years. Fuel duties therefore remain at current rates until further notice. See our Budget 2020 report