Panic at the Pump : Fewer Stations, Slower Nozzles and More Cars in Southland Add Up to Trouble if New Crisis Hits

So many cars, so few nozzles.

That’s the story from the streets of Southern California, where the bulldozing of thousands of service stations and an explosion in the fleet of cars and trucks might gum up the works during the next oil crunch.

The consolidation of the service station industry has left the Los Angeles area with just one gasoline nozzle for every 155 cars. In a decade and a half, according to a census by the Lundberg Survey, that’s a rise of 50% in the number of vehicles per nozzle.

An arcane but eye-popping ratio.

While there are more nozzles at each service station than there used to be, the number of fueling positions--places to put your car--hasn’t kept pace. In the old days, a nozzle meant something: there was one for every fueling position. At today’s new stations, you have three nozzles for every fueling position.

In other words, only one in every three nozzles can be used at a time.

Meanwhile, a roughly 40% reduction in the number of Southern California service stations since 1974 has cut by about one-fourth the amount of gasoline in retail storage--the underground gasoline inventory that backs up the “rolling inventory” in cars’ fuel tanks.

Although today’s station has slightly bigger storage tanks underground--30,000 gallons, compared to a previous 26,000--that is more than canceled out by the smaller number of stations. Thus, today’s swollen vehicle fleet has less total gasoline to draw from at any one time.

Today’s higher-volume stations require more frequent deliveries to make up for the fact that they have a two- to three-day supply of gasoline, compared to about a week’s supply in 1974.

Once the motorist gets to a nozzle and starts filling his tank, it will go more slowly: The vapor recovery gadgets in place at 80% of California’s stations permit fuel to flow at only six to eight gallons per minute.

Advantage Canceled

There is disagreement on how much of a slowdown this represents, but it is a loss of at least two gallons a minute, the California Air Resources Board says. Station operators also complain that the gadgets often malfunction in the hands of today’s do-it-yourself motorists, further slowing the process.

Of course, that loss of time tends to be offset by the fact that today’s cars have smaller gas tanks. But there’s no free lunch. In terms of how often a car needs filling--a key part of the equation during a shortage--those smaller tanks cancel out the advantage of the improved gasoline mileage achieved by today’s cars.

The bottom line?

If the motoring public behaves rationally, no problem. The gasoline distribution network is far more efficient than it was: Today’s average California station is bigger, has more pumps, and moves 84,000 gallons a month, compared to a mere 42,000 in 1974. The big, modern ones pump far more than that.

For that reason, oil executives get a little huffy at the suggestion that their industry is ill-equipped to get gasoline into cars and trucks in a pinch.

“Our industry was grossly overbuilt. Some of our old stations were built to handle 50,000 gallons a month,” says George Babikian, executive vice president of Atlantic Richfield. “We’ve got ‘em in L.A. now doing 400,000 a month.”

But Stephen R. Shelton, executive director of the Southern California Service Station Assn., a trade group, says this increased efficiency means there is less “give” in the system in the case of a sharp rise in demand.

Shelton has worked up these numbers on his personal computer and is trying to call attention to them. The rest of country has experienced most of the same changes in the gasoline market as California.

Far Longer Lines

Shelton concludes from all these statistics that California today has the capacity to pump 600,000 gallons of gasoline per minute--compared to about 1 million in 1974. Estimating the air space in the automotive fleet’s fuel tank, he says it would theoretically take 289 minutes to fill the state’s vehicles, compared to 129 minutes in 1974.

“That’s if California was one big car with one big nozzle,” he says.

Since it happily is not, he arrives at various ratios of available fuel and fueling positions and estimates that if everyone rushed to get gasoline at once--as they did during the minor oil supply interruptions of 1973-74 and 1979--the car lines could be as much as five times worse than they were during those chaotic days.

With today’s fewer stations naturally concentrated near freeways and high-traffic corners, he says, the potential for disruption is further magnified.

The way Shelton describes this phenomenon, it amounts to an Achilles’ heel in the nation’s defenses against the next energy crunch. Whether it is, the issue seems to have attracted virtually no study. Inquiries of oil companies and the Energy Department elicited top-of-the-head responses and speculative comments.

“I don’t think any of us have thought much about it,” said W. G. Walters Jr., manager of dealer and consumer affairs at Chevron Corp. in San Francisco.

An Energy Department analyst said the sagging number of nozzles per car “won’t mean anything unless there’s a surge in demand, and hoarding, and topping off of tanks.” Of course, in that event, there wouldn’t have been much trouble in 1973-74 or 1979, either.

More than any severe interruption of oil supplies, studies concluded that panic and hoarding by motorists, companies and entire nations were a major reason for the gasoline lines that formed in the 1973-74 and 1979 oil crises.

A Calming Influence

Is there reason to think there wouldn’t be any panic next time? Much of the nation’s strategy to cope with future energy crises is aimed at averting panic. Particularly in California, schemes are at the ready to identify and respond to oil shortages, real or perceived.

The main line of defense--the federal government’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve, an underground stockpile that now holds 550 million barrels of crude oil--is supposed to serve as a calming influence on markets and the public by its very existence.

But many critics in the energy community regard temporary price run-ups, panic, hoarding and regional dislocations as inevitable before oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve could be absorbed into the nation’s distribution system.

The politically active service station dealers have been complaining for years that their dwindling numbers constitute a threat to everything from public safety to public bathrooms. They also dislike the vapor-recovery gadgets. As a result, some critics see Shelton’s protests as mere ax-grinding.

“This is a good argument for them to use to try to get rid of those slow nozzles,” says Richard Bilas, a member of the California Energy Commission. “I think they’re venting their spleen.”

But the vapor-recovery devices play a small role in Shelton’s scenario. Asked how he responds to such critics, Shelton says:

“I would say, ‘OK, I’ll tell you what. When the shortage comes, you and I will stand up in front of the public and see which one of us they throw rocks at.’ ”

The planners in Sacramento and Washington have no “street smarts,” he adds.

Might Have a Mess

Nobody disputes the basic thrust of the statistics. Indeed, when similar numbers were presented at a simulated energy “crisis” conducted in Sacramento earlier this year by the California Energy Commission, they caused a stir.

Bilas, who is in charge of the commission’s crisis contingency planning, said at the time: “We were all startled. We might have a hell of a mess on our hands.”

On reflection, Bilas concluded that the worsened logistical situation is not as bad as he thought. He said that in a supply dislocation bad enough to cause gasoline lines, pump prices would climb so high that many people wouldn’t buy gas--and the lines would disappear.

“We ought not lose sight of the fact that if the market is permitted to work, the lines would be short-lived,” he says now. “I don’t want to see $2 gasoline, but that does in all honesty cut those lines down.”

But then, pricing gasoline out of people’s reach might not be the answer America is looking for.

“That isn’t a solution. That’s like destroying the village in order to save it,” says Bing West, president of GAMA Corp., a Washington consulting firm that runs energy-crisis “games” for the Defense Department, the California Energy Commission and other agencies.

Indeed, many suspect that today’s prevailing free-market philosophy at the state and national level would be cast aside in an energy crisis. Political pressure could force government to intervene to prevent gasoline and heating oil prices from going through the roof.

Bilas concedes that if prices explode, “There will be a tremendous outcry. The question is how much the price is going to go up, and how much will be tolerated.”

Logistically speaking, he adds: “In a relative sense, there’s no question the situation has gotten worse.”

Wants More Deliveries

There are other elements to the process of buying gasoline. Dealers today don’t have to rifle through lists of bad credit customers before ringing up a credit card sale. But the spread of self-service can mean two lines: one to pump gas, another to pay. Stations today are open longer hours, but hours in a crisis would simply reflect the availability of gasoline. What’s to be done?

Shelton says planners ought to anticipate the problem with mechanisms for stepped-up deliveries to stations, including commandeering extra tanker trucks for the task--if there are any. Traffic-flow studies could help police and station owners to minimize the chance of gridlock.

But there is nothing to be done about fundamental economic forces. Analysts say the industry overbuilt in a period when big oil companies made most of their money from producing crude oil, especially overseas. They paid less attention to efficiency at the corner gas station.

Today, foreign countries own and control those oil reserves, making the retail end of the business more important to the industry’s bottom line. Meanwhile, the value of the real estate traditionally occupied by gas stations now far outstrips the value of a shed and a couple of pumps selling 40,000 gallons a month.

Says Chevron’s Walters: “We can’t continue to put stations in areas that can’t support them.”