You may have heard that Missouri now has the cheapest gasoline in the nation, but do you know why? Slate’s Jacob Leibenluft explains our advantage as a combination of “taxes, pipelines and ethanol.”

Our state taxes, at 17.6 cents a gallon, aren’t the lowest, but geography helps a lot:

But because of its proximity to Texas, Oklahoma, and the Gulf Coast states, Missouri is crisscrossed by some of the nation’s larger pipelines. Oil barges also pass through the state on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Proximity to producers reduces transportation costs a little, but it also makes Missouri less susceptible to price spikes when individual refineries run into problems.