Loss of ICE engine fuel infrastructure

In My Humble Opinion
1

On one of my walks, I was asked by a man in an apparently stranded car where he could find a gas station. Living in a city, there were two within something less than a mile. I’m guessing that is true for most cities.

It occurred to me that even my [,[44.41101876903572,-94.9362934170494],null,[44.41570895905093,-94.92574697120284],16];tbs:lrf:!1m4!1u16!2m2!16m1!1e1!1m4!1u16!2m2!16m1!1e2!2m1!1e16!3sIAE,lf:1,lf_ui:3"]MN hometown](gas station morgan mn - Google Search[[44.420398772912655,-94.91520052535628) (population < 900) has two places to buy gas.

I assume this economical because lots of people/businesses have internal combustion engines (ICE) vehicles, and so a network of wells/tankers/pipelines/refineries/storage tanks/delivery trucks has built up over years to support the distribution of gas.

As fewer ICE vehicles are operated, the fixed costs of the system are spread over fewer gallons of fuel, so prices are going to have to rise. At what point does the (presumed) growth of electric vehicles begin to affect that infrastructure?

And when/if it happens, presumably rural areas would lose access/see prices jump first? Do state/federal governments step in (ala broadband/electricity/phone) to prop up supplies?

Looking at the old hometown (where I still have family), a 300-mile range vehicle would get people to Mpls/St Paul and back (which would be the main long trip), so transition to EV is more possible out there then I had believed.

2

Many gas stations in my area have either closed entirely in the past couple of years, or ripped out the pumps to focus on selling lottery tickets and soda. This is with probably 1% or less of cars here being electric.

3

I can’t imagine there’s going to be less gas stations (or more expensive gas) due to the influx of hybrid, all electric or otherwise alternative fuel vehicles for a long time.
I think it would take, at the very least, one of the big auto manufacturers (bonus points if it’s Ford or GM and we’re talking about a scenario in the US), to come up with their Tesla first. There’s been a few shots at electric cars, but Tesla seems to be the only one that’s really taken hold. I see maybe 10 Teslas a week and probably 10 Chevy Bolts and Nissan Leafs, combined, a year.

It’s going to take a large enough market share, such that charging stations (or even CNG or LP filling stations) become a routine enough site before it puts any kind of dent in how much gas the American public is using.

And, that’s not even taking into consideration pushback from the Government and Big Oil, which will slow things down even more. I’m not one to get into conspiracy theories, but some state and local governments are implementing an additional vehicle tax on electric cars specifically to make up for the loss in taxes. Naturally, that means people have less incentive to buy them.

And, regarding the range, it’s almost not the range that’s the issue, it’s what to do when you don’t have enough battery to get home. I’ve never seen a charging station out in the wild.

Like you said, you could take an electric car from MPLS to St Paul and back. Similarly, I could take one from Milwaukee to Chicago or Madison or The Dells and back, but what if I want to go further? Can I take it from Milwaukee to La Crosse or St Paul and back? Can I take it across the country without getting stranded 6 hours into the trip?

I think another thing that would lead the change is one/some of the large trucking firms changing over to electric semis. I have to assume that UPS or Schneider or JB Hunt suddenly replacing all their diesel trucks with an alternative fuel (electric, LP, CNG) would make a much, much larger dent in how much gas we use than a handful of people across the US.

One other thing, you mentioned pipelines, there’s also local pipelines. I know there’s the huge ones running oil around the country, but there’s also local ones running regular gasoline under the city. Big Oil, smaller refineries, storage sites are going to fight back against anything that keeps those networks running less than 100% of the time.

4

I’d WAG that’s due less to electric vehicles and more to poor management or simply too much competition.
Also, something to keep in mind is that gas stations make very, very little on gas. IIRC, their profit is something on the order of cents per gallon, even when you’re paying two or three dollars.
The real money is all the crap inside. The only reason the sell gas is to get you to come to their store and buy overpriced food and lottery tickets.
(My cite is an acquaintance that owns 3 local gas stations. In fact, two of them are different brands, BP and Shell, that he bought kitty corner from each other in a major intersection simply so he wouldn’t have to worry about competition form a hundred feet away).

5

Washington, DC, which covers 61 square miles and has a population of 700,000, has 36 gas stations. A few years ago, the city council passed a law stating that gas stations must remain gas stations – an owner can’t convert a gas station into apartments, other kinds of shops, etc.

But, I don’t think this has much to do with the adoption of EVs. Real estate values are going up sharply, and for a type of business that operates on razor-thin margins anyway, so the cost of business going up due to property taxes has got to be a real problem.

It’s going to be decades. EVs account for something like 1 percent of new car sales today, and since people keep their cars for many years, even if EV sales jump to like 15 percent of new cars over the next few years, we are still talking about absolutely massive numbers of ICE cars that will still be on the road for quite some time to come.

You can look at plugshare.com to see how many charging stations there are around the country.

Yes, you can take EVs on long trips. Not long ago I drove from DC to NYC (which is a bit further than Milwaukee to La Crosse), stopped for a fast charge along the way, and had literally zero problems and no inconvenience. A friend of mine goes from DC to the Outer Banks, which is about 320 miles or so, about twice a year. He loves it.

Of course, charging infrastructure is better in some parts of the country (CA, and between Boston and DC) and underdeveloped in other parts of the country. Any potential EV buyer should consider this. But the ability to take long road trips in EVs has come a very, very long way compared to five years ago when a Ford Model T nearly tied a Tesla Model S in a 760 mile race. (The Tesla was slowed down tremendously due to the need to stop at non-fast chargers.) Today, in the same race, a Tesla would complete that race approximately 8, maybe 9 hours faster than it did in 2014.

6

I don’t think any gas station makes money on the sale of fuel, it’s been a loss leader for a long time. I remember back in my days as a pump jockey I’d occasionally see the drop sheets when the truck would come by for a delivery. After adding up what we paid for the gas plus all of the taxes and surcharges, we were only marking it up about 3-5 cents/gallon depending on grade.

7

I recently visited Vancouver BC and took a tourist bus tour. One of the stops was a gas station. The tour guide proudly announced that after years of pressure the the city finally got this gas station to shut down. The lot will be turned (for 4 years) into a pocket park. When it shuts down there will be no gas stations left in the city. If you need gas, you can take your polluting car out the exurbs where it belongs and hunt around.

Vancouver is trying to become the greenest city on the planet by 2020. Sadly it doesn’t look like they will get there in time. They are in a world-wide race and a couple of cities in Europe are comfortably ahead of them. But they are going to make #3. And of course they are far far ahead of any other city in the Americas.

So not being able to find a gas station is considered a feature not a bug in some areas. :slight_smile:

8

If you have a diesel you already know the drill. Less gas stations does not equate to no gas stations, and the person adjusts.

9

It seems likely that EV sales will be heavier in cities and burbs than rural areas, simply because of range and typical driving distances. So it is entirely possible the rural areas will retain ICE infrastructure longer

10

I agree that ICE will survive longer out in the rural areas, or be needed at any rate. What I’m wondering about is if it sustainable - most of the ICE infrastructure is supported by the crowded freeways in LA/Atlanta/Dallas/Chicago/etc. The folks in the hinterlands are to some extent freeloading on that.

It seems like there is a point somewhere where the increasing number of EV vehicles affects the demand for gasoline enough that the fixed costs become harder/impossible to support (I read somewhere that early cars sometimes bought their gasoline from druggists (which seems odd and I have no cite - but where did early adopters get their fuel?).

We’re not anywhere close right now, but what is the magic number? At some point, is there a (slow) death-spiral where fuel costs move more people to EV, causing fuel to get more expensive and the next level of folks to convert? It apparently is already more economical for some/most city buses to be electric/battery from a total cost of ownership perspective

Seems like that would start before 50% adoption, but how much before?

11

The only infrastructure I can think of are refineries, which indeed, might be overbuilt for rural needs. But rural distribution already has a lot of the inefficiencies baked in since gas supply trucks already have to go out of their way to service the widespread stations. I think the stations themselves and their supply routes can survive with only a modest increase in price. I do not know enough about the infrastructure to know if refineries and secondary distribution centers would be effected enough to impinge on the future of ICE.

It’s another story if electric technology advances enough that the range will meet the overwhelming majority of people’s needs even in rural areas. That’s when you’d definitely see a collapse, which is okay except for during a natural disaster when the power gets cut off and everyone needs to recharge all at once to get out of dodge.

12

The main reason that smaller gas stations have closed isn’t anything to do specifically with the stores themselves, but with increased environmental regulation and testing. Lots of old fuel tanks leaked badly, and from the 90s on it’s being checked a lot more. Keeping up with patching and cleanup on a tank is more expensive when you can’t pollute the ground and get away with it, and the costs are mostly ‘per tank’ not ‘per gallon sold’ or ‘per pump’. The effect is that the total number of gas stations in the US has gone down dramatically, but the number of pumps has gone up, they’re just consolidated into larger stations with half a dozen to two dozen pumps rather than single stores with one pump. The trend for gas stations to close in urban centers is partially due to this, and also that with rising real estate costs and more efficient and reliable cars, there’s less need for people to fuel inside of a major urban area. I expect that gas stations inside of urban centers will die out or become novelties long before the surviving rural stations, and EV adoption will only accelerate this trend as EVs are strongest at short commutes and weakest at long drives.

13

I thought this opinion piece in the Washington Post was interesting mainly due to the statistics about EV ownership. Currently, households earnijg more than 100k own 2/3s of EVs and JP Morgan is predicting less than 10% EV market penetration by 2030. It seems most of EV ownership is concentrated in the cities so it is unlikely that rural gas stations will see any change in demand in the next decade.

Long term there will be switching pain especially for poor and rural people. Considering that car manufacturers don’t care about a market segment with 26% penetration (sedans) I think EVs need to cross that hurdle before they make an impact. 80% of people live in cities in the US and that is primarily where EVs have been adopted so I would guess about a third of Urban vehicles need to be EV before they make a serious impact. The US might get there in 20 years.

14

i looked this up and it will be the last gas station in DOWNTOWN Vancouver, not the entire city. And not due to any legislation but simply because the land it’s on it worth more to developers, even after the environmental cleanup costs associated with repurposing a gas station, then it is as operating it as a gas station.

The same has happened in Manhattan. There’s none left south of 14th St. anywhere on the island, and the few that remain are up against one river or another next to bridges or highway exits and supremely pricy, to gouge cab drivers who never leave the island and run low on fuel.

15

How much infrastructure do you need to run a gas station? I was under the impression that they brought in semi trucks full of gas to fill up the tanks beneath the station. In that case the infrastructure costs shouldn’t be that high.

16

Part of the problem is EPA regulation of the underground storage tanks. Several stations went out of business in 1999 because they couldn’t afford to comply with new regulations.

17

Being able to buy gasoline isn’t as important as having electricity or even the internet considering you can just go buy an electric car. I don’t recall a government effort to prop up infrastructure for horses and buggies when we changed to horseless carriages to provide for the people that didn’t want to switch. Gasoline cars and their infrastructure aren’t going away until we get an affordable car that can make a 500 miles road trip (about a days drive for most people) and can haul the things people need. Such a car will be adequate to serve rural needs.

Maybe it would suck to have a 5 year old gasoline car you can’t refuel, but a lot of people were stuck with Betamaxes too.

18

Somebody designs, builds, sells, and drives the fuel trucks. They pick up fuel from refineries that produce blends specifically for use in IC engines (i.e. gasoline and diesel fuels of various octane/cetane ratings). The refineries maintain the capacity to produce those blends. Interstate pipeline networks transfer raw petroleum and finished blends from place to place. Tanker ships likewise transport raw petroleum and finished blends across the open ocean.

Somebody designs, builds, sells, and installs the underground tanks and dispensers that are used by a gas station.

In short, there’s a lot of infrastructure required to run a gas station.

19

But where does the tanker get it’s gas from? And where does that place get it’s gas from? And all the way back until you get to the oil field. All of that is part of the infrastructure and all people involved, directly or tangentially, have an interest in gas (and other petroleum products) getting consumed.

Even with inflation taken into account, I would doubt that the horse and buggy industry was anywhere near the size of the oil industry.

20

I suspect what we’ll eventually see is that gas stations will gradually switch over to being charging stations, assuming that some sort of fast-charging, battery swap or fuel-cell type technology ends up being adopted for EVs. I think it’ll prove too convenient to have places to check your tires, get a snack/drink, get a car wash and wash your windshield without having charging at them as well.

I suspect they’ll be just as common, or possibly more so on the highways- with charging times being longer than fillups, there will be a need for more charging stations than gas pumps at busy times. But I think they’ll become pretty thin on the ground within cities, especially in residential areas, since people will presumably be able to charge at home overnight, obviating the need for your average commuter to need to visit a charging station very often.

As to when the tipping point away from the ready availability of gasoline/diesel will occur; with gas, I don’t think it’ll be a gas price type event. It’ll be at the point when people start looking at EVs and realizing that they can buy one and operate one for the same cost as a gasoline vehicle, AND not have the current drawbacks (range, charge time). When that happens, you’ll see a pretty mad rush to EVs. Diesel will continue to be about as available as it is today until such time that heavy commercial equipment goes electric (or some other fuel)- dump trucks, semis, bulldozers, excavators, etc… since the majority of diesel out there is not consumed by passenger cars. I half suspect some sort of biodiesel or carbon neutral diesel will supplant the petroleum-based kind before those sorts of machines go electric.