Posted on 04/21/2006 5:13:16 AM PDT by Bloodclot
Gas stations in three East Coast states ran out of fuel on Thursday as gas prices soared. Shortages were reported in Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania starting on Thursday afternoon. They could last as long as 30 days.
NBC 10 was live at one gas station when the pumps went dry at rush hour.
Catherine Rossi, a spokeswoman for AAA Mid-Atlantic, says she knows of eight stations in the Philadelphia region that were out of fuel yesterday.
Wayne Hummel of Liberty Petroleum says there's a derth of fuel in the New York and Philadelphia areas. He says four of the 40 stations Liberty supplies in the Philadelphia region ran out of fuel in the last two days.
Refiners are switching to fuel formulations containing corn-based ethanol, prompted by the federal Energy Policy Act of 2005. To do that, retailers must clean their tanks, remove all water and install extremely fine filters on their pumps. Terminals have to clean storage tanks, too.
An NBC 10 news team was at a Wilmington, Del., gas station on Thursday afternoon, where reporter Bill Baldini informed drivers pulling up to the pumps that the station was on empty.
On Thursday night, reporter Kristen Welker had the same experience at a Northern Liberties gas station. Closer to home for NBC10.com, a Luk Oil station just blocks from our station was out of gas as news trucks hit the street to report the Thursday afternoon news.
Stations in New Jersey and in several other Pennsylvania areas are also out of fuel, or only selling premium fuel, AAA told NBC 10.
Rossi said the shortages were expected to be temporary.
By temporary, AAA and other experts said the shortage situation could last for as long as 30 days.
The news was unwelcome to drivers who saw a big jump at the gas pumps recently.
On Thursday morning, NBC 10 reported that prices at some local gas stations had hit $3 per gallon.
An NBC 10 news van stopping in Conshohocken, Pa., saw gas selling for $3.09 for a gallon of regular unleaded at a local station.
Don't expect those prices to go down in the near future.
Overseas on Thursday, crude oil prices hit a new record intraday high of $72.49 after weekly data showed a drop in U.S. gasoline stocks.
This is raising worries that refiners don't have an adequate inventory cushion ahead of the peak summer driving season.
The previous record intraday price, set Wednesday, was $72.40 a barrel.
Point well taken. I should try to keep it above 1/2. I do a lot of driving.
Well of course it's Bush's fault /SARCASM!
The refiners had plenty of time to get ready. THEY DID NOT!
Last I heard refineries were only operating at 85% capacity. All the drilling in the world ain't gonna make more gas.
He got a tank loaded with water from a station that didn't empty out its tanks and clean and dry them; the $700 was a dealer estimate of repairs to clean and dry his fuel system.
The cars were hard to start on cold mornings because ethanol burns at a higher temperature than gasoline. Creating a fuel with 10% ethanol makes little difference to a car's performance, but anything above that, researchers have found, can cause problems. The mixture can corrode metal engine parts because of its high water content, for example.
Almost all underground fuel storage tanks now are made of fiberglas and are impervious to to corrosion, the problem is the water itself and collected residue from the venting system; if gasoline is added to a tank that already has too much water at the bottom there is a great risk of phase separation every time the tank is filled until it reaches a point where the raw water and alcohol will be pumped directly into the gas tanks of cars.
Proper station maintenance requires periodic pumping of the condensed, collected water which will be contaminated with some of the gasoline product when pulled out of the ground and disposal is quite expensive since it requires the use of special overpack drums and hazardous waste final disposal methods.
Station operators who don't perform this maintenance are beseiged with complaints and often find themselves answering to the pollution police.
I hear there's crude up there in Alaska, or maybe it was Texas - but if we drill there the world will end, so I guess that's out of the question. But then there's ethanol - but that's bad too because I read it on a message board somewhere. Guess we're screwed. Time to pay the government a billion dollars for Federally run mass transit. That will work.
Buy your gas from a station located on a hill that sells a lot of gas and never buy while or right after a truck has dropped a load.
Your fuel filter should be changed according to owner's manual guidelines or whenever you experience engines bucking, misfire or stalling problems.
You know that if it weren't for term limits, Bill Clinton would still be president, don't you?
It's interesting how witnesses who appear on the news interviews manage to lump lack of gasoline together with the long-gone days of $1.50 fuel. This shortage is a distribution problem and somebody is not doing his job.
Effective thinkers no longer think in terms less than $1 trillion.
Not only him, but back right before the first gulf war Maggie Thatcher tried to get Bush Sr. to get the Saudis to sign an agreement setting the price of oil at $35 a barrel for the next 100 years for the US as part of a compensation package for protecting them.
Looks like we all better pull out our geography books for the US and recheck what is grown and produced state-by-state, LOL!
I remember learning a lot of this stuff as a kid, do they still teach it?
Bogus industrial statistic. One can run any plant at 100% capacity ... then it will break down ... and you'll have 0%.
The "capacity" statistic has to be tempered with "availability" after maintenance.
Possible, but unlikely. Bill never did achieve 50% on his own, he needed Ross Perot, and two very weak Republican Campaigns.
Check the article again.
"Refiners are switching to fuel formulations containing corn-based ethanol, prompted by the federal Energy Policy Act of 2005. To do that, retailers must clean their tanks, remove all water and install extremely fine filters on their pumps. Terminals have to clean storage tanks, too.
It seems Congress and the EPA makes rules with no conception of the havoc it can create throughout the supply chain. Or maybe they do know and don't give a damn as long as all the economic illiterates blame the oil industry and not the real culprits.
That was just a WAG ( wild a$$ guess ) off the cuff-- I should have known that real life would eclipse it. Darn!
At $75 a barrel now and gas up another 3 cent average it's probably official, Good Luck Republicans Being A Minority Till At Least '08.
I wonder if these boutique fuels are also a way of hastening the demise of older vehicles. My '81 Custom Cruiser has been running rough lately and replacing the carb [because the floats were getting saturated] didn't restore the recently rebuilt 403's usual smooth operation.
Is there some additive that can counteract the effects of ethanol for older engines?
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