Friday 24 September 2021

Gotta love a petrol crisis

 Last year it was toilet rolls, the flour...

Now the old favourite a good old scare about petrol and, err, boom. There is no petrol. 

Can confirm out of my window a 1 mile queue to the only petrol station with any left around here currently with a very happy franchise owner no doubt. 

These crises are such a good example of the downside of the risk-cost management approach of just in time delivery. Who wants expensive stock when you can rely on 99% delivery of enough product. Only the 1% of the time is rather painful.

As to the Government, nothing can be done. If petrol stations all get emptied, then indeed there is a crisis. Saying there is no crisis just makes it worse as people second guess. The crisis subsides in a few days when the cars are full and the stations can gradually re-stock. 

Perhaps the only lesson for now is that with a shortage of HGV drivers, perhaps there does need to be a hierarchy of need to allocate our resources - food, power, petrol, public transport, ambulances - these could have some priority to available resources, but all too complicated to figure out and implement before the crisis is over. Endure it we will!

33 comments:

Anonymous said...

The media making this the top story has once again driven the public to a panic.

You'd think they'd be smart enough to realise that giving the disclaimer "there's no need to panic buy" is always going to have the effect of causing people to panic buy.

Maybe keeping the issues BP are facing to a small section on the business pages would have sufficed.

dearieme said...

Perhaps some "staycationers" are going to find it difficult to drive home.

Maybe we should buy some containers and fill them with diesel. I wouldn't care to store a lot of petrol in our garage but diesel should be OK. Not much use, though, if some toe rag steals it.

Come to think of it, what if some toe rag steals our car? It's happened once before.

Anonymous said...

Filled up this morning in Grangemouth on my way south, no queue at all. Obviously the locals aren't too worried what with having a refinery in the doorstep.

jim said...

Indeed all very predictable.

Inevitably there are siren voices - if only we had a competent Prime Minister/Government or got rid of the BBC/Local Councils/NHS - all our troubles would be over. Phooey all round, none of these is individually anything to do with our problems - if at all, indeed some are put in as diversions for the loony fringes. But there is something wrong with the UK's way of doing things - but what.

Replacing Boris would achieve nothing, Gove would quickly find himself facing the same problems and so would Starmer and we can't afford to move Sunak. Imagine for a moment we had a free hand with the axe, what would we do to 'sort out Britain'.

My own prejudice is that we have too many chiefs and not enough Indians. Many years of educational and managerial 'advancement' have left us with an overstuffed layer that is too grand for day to day managerial work and thought. No, not another rant about the Civil Service, the layer above them. Thin out the upper middle class, push the useful work lower down with responsibilities very clearly defined and publicly accountable. Oh, and chop off the idea of Duke/Duchess, I am sick of hearing about them.

Anonymous said...

Is this like Covid where we just had to take it on the chin?

Don Cox said...

The situation will ease when HGV drivers are paid substantially more than Equality-and-Diversity officers.

Money has to be spent to provide more lorry parks, with 24-hour refreshments and toilets.

Don Cox

John said...

The EV drivers will be grinning at every problem for diesel and petrol drivers. Until the next cloudy windless period!

Elby the Beserk said...

Don Cox said...
The situation will ease when HGV drivers are paid substantially more than Equality-and-Diversity officers.

Money has to be spent to provide more lorry parks, with 24-hour refreshments and toilets.

Don Cox

9:06 am
=======================================================

10/10 Don. Abso-bloody-lutely

auralay said...

This from FaceBook, a friend of a friend.
https://www.facebook.com/neil.collins.1466

Neil Howard is feeling puzzled.
Yesterday at 05:57 ·
So, after seeing the news last night about fuel shortages, I popped in to Tesco at 0530 when I should have been sleeping! I spoke to a very nice tanker driver who was rather informative and told me that the boats carrying fuel are arriving daily at Plymouth, the two depots in Plymouth are extremely well stocked and there is no shortage of drivers. His only concern was news articles misleading the public. He finished by explaining that it is only BP who have issues. Back to bed....

Anonymous said...

If there is no shortage of drivers, and no shortage of petrol, why does Boris keep responding to the Sun/DT/Express/Mail?

andrew said...

Auralay neatly illustrates the problem.

This is a govt led by a person who has a track record of not telling the truth.

So collectively we do not believe them.

Quite sensible really.

E-K said...

They haven't reallocated all the lorry drivers working on HS2 yet so... fake news.

But one thing is for sure. The EU WAS depressing the wages and conditions of unskilled and semi skilled workers - I would have understood this economic model had it not been underwritten by a nation bankrupting health, welfare and benefits system.

E-K said...

And fuel lorry drivers are highly trained and don't just disappear. They are the elite in the lorry driving industry. Top of the pay scale.

Penseivat said...

I understand that sperm banks are running out of contributions as all the wankers are querying up outside petrol stations.

E-K said...

Further... there is a shortage of train drivers too. There hasn't been any training for 18 months and lots have retired in the meantime.

So nothing to do with Brexit.

Elby the Beserk said...

E-K said...
Further... there is a shortage of train drivers too. There hasn't been any training for 18 months and lots have retired in the meantime.

So nothing to do with Brexit.

1:47 pm
===============================

Stupidly put on R4 this morning. On the stump interviewing punters about petrol and supply chain problems. Asked them all if they thought it might be down to Brexit (tho' we know it isn't) or Covid (which we know it isn't), tho' tip of the hat to the feller who said it was down to "stupid people".

Then studio interview with Theresa Villiers, former Minister for Transport. Early question - "Is it because of YOUR Brexit?". You ****ing what?

The BBC cannot be fixed. Its state of ideological possession cannot be changed than by dumping the licence fee. They don't give a flying duck.

Don Cox said...

Anyway, when everyone has a full tank and full jerrycans in the garage, the petrol crisis must vanish.

Don Cox

andrew said...

Red sky at night

Your garage is alight

--

In other news why doesnt hgv training get proper support.
I was given a full grant when i went to college.
Training is expensive and i can see why hauliers dont like paying.
Part of levelling up...

APL said...

2019 - COVID* terror? The BBC formented it in the UK.
2021 - Shortage terror? The BBC is formenting it in the UK.

Is the problem an epidemic of the sniffles, or an iminary shortage of fuel?

No, the problem is the BBC.



* The Spanish had figured out how to treat COVID by March 2020. Piriton and azithromycin. 100% survival rate of aged and infirm patients so treated.

APL said...

forgot to include the URL

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7833340/#!po=34.9057

jim said...

Fail to plan = plan to fail. Parliamentary complacency led to the conditions for Brexit Post referendum arrogance and incompetence failed to make the necessary dramatic changes a long way pre Covid. Now we are in a Death Spiral.

The Army might help out, but Care Homes, the Gas Crunch and the leccy bills are coming up behind fast. The fuel delivery crisis will be back.

Too late to save Boris, just waiting for the crash. If Ms Rayner plays her cards right she will be in by Summer 2022.

Elby the Beserk said...

Mate of mine posted this on FB. Telegraph I assume - but he always posts from verifiable sources. This sounds right to me...

Sometimes, when sensitive details of a government meeting are leaked to the media, it can take months and a full-scale inquiry to identify the mole.
No such inquiry has been launched into the leak that prompted the fuel crisis last Thursday, because the shortlist of suspects, according to Whitehall insiders, has only ever consisted of one name.

The Road Haulage Association, which attended a Zoom call hosted by the Cabinet Office to discuss driver shortages, has been accused of prompting the weekend’s panic-buying in order to further its own political agenda. The RHA has been campaigning for months for cheap foreign labour to be allowed back into the country to make up a shortfall of lorry drivers, which it has “massively exaggerated”, sources say.

One senior Government source said the RHA “owes an apology to the British people” for the weekend chaos.

Elby the Beserk said...

jim said...

Too late to save Boris, just waiting for the crash. If Ms Rayner plays her cards right she will be in by Summer 2022.

7:07 am
====================================================
We may be stupid, but there is no way the ordinary working bloke or blokette will vote for Rayner. She's brainless, and that's evident every time she opens her mouth. Stockport lasses usually much smarter then Angela...

Guido quote of the week...

"Angela Rayner, deputy leader of the Labour Party, tells conference delegates:

“I’m sick of shouting from the sidelines, and i bet youse lot are too. We cannot get any worse than a bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, mysoginistic, absolute pile …of banana republic…Etonian…piece of scum…and I held back a little…that I have ever seen in my life…”"

Mind you, there's always Jess Phillips. She does a very good Rayner impersonation - and bet it will go down a treat at conference.

Labour is done for. That the Tories can hold any sort of poll lead after how they have utterly fucked up the country this past 18 months indicates just how empty the opposition party is. So empty they elected a hole in space to be leader. Way to go.

Anonymous said...

@Elby it's called gaslighting and the same was reported in the Mail but with the additional comment that the purported individual would be "dealt with" after the crisis.

What sort of punishment would be appropriate? Would it be Sisyphus-like except with a full taker?

Elby the Beserk said...

andrew said...
Red sky at night

Your garage is alight

--

In other news why doesnt hgv training get proper support.
I was given a full grant when i went to college.
Training is expensive and i can see why hauliers dont like paying.
Part of levelling up...
4:19 pm
============================

Yup. As I noted a few days back, you can get a "loan" of £60k or more if you are illiterate, want to study Illiteracy at Illiteracy Metropolitan Uni, but can you get help amounting to a few £k to train as an HGV driver? Nope.

Still, good job we're all loaded, with wallets too fat to stuff in our pockets, eh?

Bill Quango MP said...

Asked the RAF neighbour is the airforce had many tanker drivers.
He said no. They use civilian contractors.

He was complaining about the training. Suggesting that as the supermarkets are really the largest fuel suppliers, they should pay for training of drivers. Instead of insisting on the highest standards, lowest pay.

But is it a realistic job?

Government is going to phase out diesel and petrol cars by 2030. So realistically, sales will collapse by 2025 and electrification of everything must be in place by 2029 at the very, very latest.

Not much future in tanker delivery driving for anyone currently under sixty five.

Anonymous said...

The driver shortage has been known about for years.

5 or 6 years ago I was in meetings where the logistics firms used by the company I work were warning that there are driver shortages, as the average driver age is increasing (as there's a lack of younger drivers coming into the market) and as the older drivers retired, this will become critical at some point - which we're now seeing.

Government is often a big driver in the issues we face, either through bureaucracy or policy yet the solution everyone screams for when have issues caused from this, is always more government.

Why does no one (except for maybe some fringe blog posts or twitter threads) ever stop and ask maybe the government should be doing less.

andrew said...

Why does no one (except for maybe some fringe blog posts or twitter threads) ever stop and ask maybe the government should be doing less.


Because they are not erm very clever.

Problem arises
a)
do nothing - but what is the point of being in power...
b)
do something that may (or may not) solve the problem = more govt
and move on quickly to another ministerial post
c)
look into the complex emergent processes that caused the problem, assess risks and benefits (you cannot know everything)
propose a proper policy for change = possibly less govt
but it is guaranteed if less govt there will be a chorus of doom from all those who may lose out = it is hard to get things done.

So there is a natural tendency (call it andrew's postulate)

Govt tends to get larger and less efficient and less fit for use as time goes by until it is generally agreed that there needs to be a systematic reform.
At which point it may or may not shrink.

Elby the Beserk said...

Bill Quango MP said...


Government is going to phase out diesel and petrol cars by 2030. So realistically, sales will collapse by 2025 and electrification of everything must be in place by 2029 at the very, very latest.
==========================================

Believe me, it's not going to happen. We're decades off NetZero, and meantime, we are sinking into a Grand Solar Minimum which many scientists (ignored by the BBC natch. Links if wanted) say may last 2 to 3 decades, with cooling.

On NetZero & Electrification, I keep posting these.

"“At present new home car chargers and heat pumps are using up all the spare capacity. But we will soon reach the point where the network will not be able to handle the extra demand. So in towns and cities, the underground cables which carry the power will be inadequate. That means that we are going to have to dig up almost every urban street and many rural ones too. The whole distribution grid is going to need to be replaced.”

And the cables that carry power into the homes will need to be dug up too."

https://www.thegwpf.org/net-zero-every-urban-street-and-front-drive-will-be-dug-up/

Full report linked to in the article.

Britain’s Electric Car Strategy Is ‘Doomed To Failure’


"On battery electric vehicles, he says:

Consider Dinorwig power station, the biggest hydropower energy storage plant in the UK. If all UK cars were battery powered, the nine gigawatts of energy stored behind the dam would be capable of recharging about 60,000 of them, or about 0.25 per cent of the UK fleet.”

If all vehicles have to be electric, “something of the order of 70 per cent of Britain’s entire existing electricity supply capacity will be needed”.

When we get coded messages from the Climate Change Committee, implying that we will have to rethink the extent to which we are going to be able to travel in future, it is the implausibility of meeting that vast gulf in energy sources that is motivating them to question our lifestyles.”"

https://www.thegwpf.com/britains-electric-car-strategy-is-doomed-to-failure/

"Britain’s plans to decarbonise the economy have not been properly thought through, and there is a dangerous lack of systems and project engineering input.

That’s according to Michael Kelly, emeritus professor of technology in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge, who says that replacing fossil fuels with electricity from renewables is impractical on the timescale of 2050.

It’s clear that there has been little or no systems engineering input into the plans. How can we possibly proceed further along the renewables path when we lack any technology to store electricity at scale? How can we hope to electrify transport when we would need to consume the whole global annual supply of several important minerals to do so, just for the UK?”"

https://www.thegwpf.com/new-paper-decarbonisation-plans-fail-engineering-reality-check/

Report linked to

and finally

"Last year we warned that the capital cost of decarbonising housing was likely to approach £1 trillion. BEIS and the Committee on Climate Change, however, are insisting it can all be done on the cheap. Now at least some of their misleading claims have been exposed by MPs,” GWPF director Benny Peiser said.

The report, from the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee, says that bills may run to an average of £18,000 per property, with the cost of heat pumps to be added, but without even considering the costs of installation larger radiators that will be required in most homes.

The Committee’s own estimates, however, are still too conservative. The committee’s £5000 figure for installing heat pumps is simply not credible."

https://www.thegwpf.com/gwpf-welcomes-recognition-public-has-been-misled-over-net-zero-costs/


Test on the above at 11 :-)

Elby the Beserk said...

Jim,

More on how Rayner is annon-starter in CapX

https://capx.co/angela-rayner-wants-to-take-working-class-women-like-me-down-with-her/

"But the fact people from the North use ‘scum’ as a term of endearment is certainly news to me. Following her outburst at a late night fringe event where Rayner said ‘We cannot get any worse than a bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, absolute pile of banana republic, Etonian piece of scum’, she refused to apologise and instead sought to school us on working class slang. ‘Let me contextualise it. It’s a phrase that you would hear very often in Northern working class towns. We’d even say it jovially to other people!’ she said. Really? Next time I see a friend, I shall be sure to greet them with, ‘Hi scum! I haven’t you in a while, how are you?’"

People won't vote for her, same as with Corbyn. She doesn't represent working class people, she represents the Rayners of this world, who end up in politics because they are incapable of productive work. And because we insist on voting for whoever, even tho' we know whoever, whatever their colour of politics, is at best not up to the job, at worst. venal, mendacious and corrupt.

dearieme said...

"In other news why doesnt hgv training get proper support.
I was given a full grant when i went to college."

You can ask that of every skilled or semi-skilled trade. Or, put the other way round, why are we subsidising so many unsuitable people to go to college at all?

Elby the Beserk said...

dearieme said...
"In other news why doesnt hgv training get proper support.
I was given a full grant when i went to college."

You can ask that of every skilled or semi-skilled trade. Or, put the other way round, why are we subsidising so many unsuitable people to go to college at all?

7:51 pm
====================================================

Because it keeps them off the unemployment stats for 3 years. And turns them into hard core Lefties. As fine a use of taxpayer funding as you could possibly come up with

Anonymous said...

"Government is going to phase out petrol and diesel by 2030... so realistically electrification of everything must be in place by 2029."

Not true. The sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles will be banned (under current legislation) from 2030. Existing ICU vehicles may still be driven on the roads, and there will also be an ongoing second-hand market.

There are currently 31.7 million cars on the UK roads, plus another 5.4m goods vehicles, nearly all ICU driven. If government (or anyone else) imagines that those are all going to be scrapped within the next nine years and replaced by electrical vehicles, then they are either mentally defective or working for the BBC.

And that is even before taking into consideration the battery and power supply issues raised in the posts above.