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Fuel shortages in the UK?

skydriller wrote:

its no different to Ice cream temporarily disappearing out of supermarkets in a heat wave.

Is that a normal UK thing as well?

You just didn’t get/read what I wrote. Even if people are continuously filling up their cars (24/7), this will NOT empty the tanks on a normal gas station unless:

  • gas stations have miniature tank facilities
  • gas stations only have fumes left in their tanks
  • there are not enough gasoline trucks
  • any combination of the above will make it worse

The reason is that gas station only have a limited amount of pumps, and it takes a long time to fill up each car with a very small volume in relation to the total volume of gasoline at the gas station and the capacity of a gasoline truck.

Look. This doesn’t really interest me all that much except it’s rather funny But, this is basic stuff. If the supply lines serving many consumers, be it gasoline or milk or whatever, is running at peak capacity, stretched to the absolute limit, then it takes only one single faulty supplier at one single station for the shortage to cascade to every gas station in the area. The reason is when one station is empty, people go to the next which already is running on fumes and cannot handle the extra cars. This spreads out exponentially.

This creates a panic. People fill more than usual, which seemingly makes it worse. However, this is NOT the cause of the shortage, it’s only a (panic) effect. Eventually people get the gasoline they need, but unless the supply is improved, it will happen again. Some ration system will also work, or increasing the gasoline price. In some sense you could say that this could easily be fixed by increasing the prices a bit faster.

Some years ago the gas stations here used to have a “war”. About once every two weeks or something at various times, one brand would suddenly slash the prices. This would make “everyone” go to that particular brand and fill up the car. This kept going on for years. The logic behind it was that if they got the timing right, they would prevent the other brands from selling fuel (making money) because they couldn’t react fast enough. Pretty stupid, but not even once did it ever happen that a gas station went dry.

The elephant is the circulation
ENVA ENOP ENMO, Norway

And this perfectly illustrates the problem.

Those who understand how supply chains work explain patiently that panic buying (and that is what “filling up just in case” is} causes a massive demand spike, that no sensible supply chain has the capacity to supply such a spike, etc etc

And people who obviously no clue then say “it must be something else”. And then they go and fill up, as if the reason for the shortage made any difference.

All supply lines have buffers to accommodate normal demand peaks. Some have stages with strategic reserves. No sensible supply chain for something that is produced continuously and in vast quantities has capacity to deal with a 5-10 fold demand spike.

Why on earth should a fuel supplier have even 2x more tankers sitting idle for the day the idiot press comes around and does the equivalent of yelling “fire” in a crowded theatre.

Last Edited by Cobalt at 04 Oct 06:01
Biggin Hill

LeSving wrote:

Even if people are continuously filling up their cars (24/7), this will NOT empty the tanks on a normal gas station unless:

Yes it will.

The storage tanks at a gas station, at least in this country, are not that big. Most gas stations take a delivery (of both unleaded and diesel) at least once per week, and the delivery is J-i-T scheduled based on the (usually) highly predictable rate at which gas is sold. It is quite common to drive past and see a tanker in a gas station making a delivery – this is not something that happens once in a blue moon.

If people start panic-buying and demand spikes to 500% of normal, the gas will be used up 5x more quickly than normal – and this will easily see them run out in a day or less. So the gas station phones the supplier and asks for the next delivery to come several days early, but it cannot because every other gas station is asking for the same thing. At present most UK gas stations are getting deliveries at least twice as often as normal, and they are still running dry before the next one arrives.

I think we’ve debunked the ‘but where are people putting it’ challenge. Some simple reasoning and arithmetic shows that, in normal times, there are many hundreds of millions of litres of empty tank space driving around the UK’s roads and sitting on driveways. The question is – and I’m sure someone has done the numbers – when will this limiting factor kick in?

EGLM & EGTN

Graham wrote:

Some simple reasoning and arithmetic shows that, in normal times, there are many hundreds of millions of litres of empty tank space driving around the UK’s roads and sitting on driveways. The question is – and I’m sure someone has done the numbers – when will this limiting factor kick in?

Using similarly simple reasoning – let’s assume every fuel station gets a delivery once a week. So on average, they have 3.5 days of supply available, plus a bit of reserve so let’s say 4 days.

If peak additional demand is 500%, they will ALL run dry on day one, and at that point there is still 2 days’ demand left unsatisfied.

On day 2, they now have to satisfy a normal day’s demand, plus the 2 days ‘hangover’. But normal deliveries are on average only 1 days demand.

As long as people continue with their changed behaviour, and assuming there is 20% spare capacity in the supply chain, this will take 10 days to resolve. It will be a lot quicker for remote forecourts where they are getting a delivery every 10-20 days, and a lot worse for those who get frequent deliveries.

The one thing that surprises me is that people are surprised that supply chains have little to no slack. Slack costs money. There are people who optimise this to a tee, using demand forecasts, supply forecasts, even forecasts of the usual sick time patterns depending on weather, football events etc. to make sure that there is no wasted resource, and where possible put the burden of dealing with peak demand on somebody else – be it the government paying for a “strategic reserve”, the ability to import tankers and/or cheap labour quickly, using third party providers for brief times etc.

Biggin Hill

Part of me is secretly pleased at mild shortages. I’ve long felt that as civilisation becomes more complex, it becomes more fragile. The Covid PPE debacles also demonstrated how we are over-reliant on complex supply chains. We need a little more slack in the system, and as it’s expensive, the need for more slack needs to be apparent before anybody will do anything about it.

Covid PPE debacles also demonstrated how we are over-reliant on complex supply chains

It also demonstrates how reliant we are on the criminal organisation called China. I have just had a Chinese company steal a moulding tool (USD 2800) and a USD 1800 prepayment for some PCBs. Why? They increased the price of the mouldings from USD 0.13 to USD 0.30, citing “covid”. What can I do about it? Absolutely nothing. The only good thing is that I have the 3D data so I can now have the pleasure of giving £5k to a UK company for a new tool. And guess where they will get the tool made? And since I will be paying 30p for the moulding, I will not have to touch China again with a 20ft bargepole (on this item) which has to be worth every penny

And this is not the first time the thieves have done this, over the 20 years I’ve been buying from there.

So why does the NHS buy PPE from these criminals? Because nobody else will match the “target price”. The NHS has ultra-aggressive buyers and they invite x bids and the lowest bid (that meets their spec) wins. Of course the bids are from UK firms (the approval process will be eye-watering, regardless of whether the bidder has “political contacts”) and only a small list of firms ever get onto the list. It is probably as hard as getting to be an approved supplier of phone sockets to BT. But these UK firms will be buying the stuff from China because that is the only way to achieve the target price. Even if China was caught poisoning UK govt officials, the stuff would still be bought from there and the NHS procurement chiefs would pretend they don’t know. And this repeats in every country in the world; certainly every country in Europe.

We need a little more slack in the system

Indeed; we need more people to realise “JIT” is an extremely fragile concept which works only while it does, and only while the buyer has a lot more power than the seller.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

It also demonstrates how reliant we are on the criminal organisation called China. I have just had a Chinese company steal a moulding tool (USD 2800) and a USD 1800 prepayment for some PCBs. Why? They increased the price of the mouldings from USD 0.13 to USD 0.30, citing “covid”. What can I do about it? Absolutely nothing.

You don’t think this is slightly racist? An entire country is a criminal organisation because one company steals from your company? The UK government owes me over half a million in tax I paid too much last year, they’ve been dicking me around since April, admit they owe me the money but due to Covid there is only one person who can pay me the money they owe me. I’ve written to Rishi Sunak, and Jim Harra (HMRC CEO) kindly explaining how tired I was of the stalling tactics. As I don’t live in the UK the bank I had been with since the early 2000’s in the UK ordered me to close my account, no longer allowed since Brexit, and HMRC don’t want to pay in an overseas account because they fear fraud ;-) (ironic from HMRC)
Now if I were to start treating the UK like a banana republic on this forum, you wouldn’t take offense? A

LFHN - Bellegarde - Vouvray France

LFHNflightstudent wrote:

You don’t think this is slightly racist?

Not remotely.

He’s talking about the country, not a race.

Organ harvesting to order, genocide of ethnic groups, industrial espionage, etc, etc. The Chineese communist party is horrendous and their practices are pretty evil.

The fact that the west has used the cheap slave labour for years is far from ideal.

I’m with Peter in the hope that businesses will move things home a bit to more reliable / well run countries.

P.S. I’m with you with HMRC being a disaster. I’ve spent another couple of hours on the phone today to them (mostly on hold) Chasing up something yet to be sorted when I have a letter from April from them saying “Thank you for providing the information requested. We can confirm that no further action is required” I’m months on, one complaint in and one letter from my local MP.

LFHNflightstudent wrote:

You don’t think this is slightly racist?

I used to have a Taiwanese flatmate, and despite being of the same Han ethnicity as most mainland Chinese, she and her friends did not have much good to say about mainland China either. My own impression is that it is so corrupt and overcompetitive that it is hard for honest businesspeople to prosper there. Given recent news about Evergrande and disinvestment, I suspect China is heading for a very heavy and painful fall; I hope it does not threaten the peace when it happens.

LFHNflightstudent wrote:

Now if I were to start treating the UK like a banana republic on this forum, you wouldn’t take offense? A

Personally, no. You have my sympathies.

Last Edited by kwlf at 04 Oct 16:20

because one company steals from your company?

Not one company, but almost every company I have dealt with there in the last 20 years, where “tooling” was involved (mould tooling, test equipment made by me and sent out there, PCB tooling, etc) has vanished suddenly and with a total loss of everything. Sometimes one gets a few years out of one. The one which stood out was a company based in Hong Kong, very “proper” Brit educated owners, who used various Chinese firms to make stuff, but even they packed up with China a year or so ago, after the last firm vanished, stealing all the tooling, but fortunately doing this 2 weeks after the last batch of the product was loaded onto the ship.

Well, another exception was one firm which vanished as described before, but whose Taiwanese owners managed to steal the assets out of the locked-up Chinese factory and ever so kindly offered it to us, so we could buy it, having already paid for it some years earlier

The magnitude of the “crookedness” out there is beyond description and beyond comprehension of anyone reasonable.

In addition, you get incompetence and done with a totally straight face. One company’s email got hacked so we got a fake email with “new bank details”. So our payment went missing. The most popular fraud today and very hard to guard against. They just told us to f-off and if we want the goods we have to pay them again. We had no choice (due to timing) so we paid them the USD 2000 again, and of course never used them again. They keep emailing, asking why we don’t buy. They totally just don’t get it.

One funny thing: one of the firms which vanished sent us a pack of NHS-style masks, at the start of the virus crisis. I thought: “how nice of them”. They were selling for huge money back then. Well, they were 100% defective. All the elastic bands came off I’ve been gluing them back on with epoxy, and I am still getting through them.

China was very different 20-30 years ago. But the culture has changed dramatically. Of course there are still lots of decent ordinary hard working people out there, but I would put the % at no more 30% of companies run straight, chosen randomly.

This is getting well off topic, but it impinges on the whole purchasing culture we have in the West, where so much stuff runs right on the edge. The petrol panic has the effect it has because of that.

Racist? An emotive term. Of course the comment is not racist. It’s a comment on a bent corporate culture.

Now if I were to start treating the UK like a banana republic on this forum, you wouldn’t take offense?

Plenty already doing that I’ve just had a DHL parcel stuck in Customs in The Netherlands, for no reason at all. They just appear to sit on every letter or package from the UK right now, for a week. Just for fun. They don’t do it with US packages, etc. Just UK ones. Normally DHL speed things up but this time could do nothing.

UK HMRC is badly organised and they’ve had loads of people “working from home” i.e. doing nothing. I have a very low opinion of HMRC and their dodgy practices, but they aren’t going to “steal” money from you.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom
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