-
May 11, 2008 3:31 pm US/Central
-
Digg |
Facebook |
E-mail
|
Print
Gas Prices Higher Than Old Time Pumps Can Handle
WINDSOR, N.D. (AP) ―
Fuel costs greater than $4 a gallon aren't just expensive for motorists. They're causing headaches for thousands of rural fuel dealers whose pumps can't count that high.
Equipment suppliers are reporting a surge in demand for gear that will allow older fuel pumps, which use mechanical reels instead of digital readouts, to display prices up to $9.99 a gallon. The result is a waiting list that can last two months or more, industry officials say.
In some states, regulators are attempting to work around rules that require service station and convenience store fuel pumps to display per-gallon prices. Older, unmodified fuel pumps often cannot show prices higher than $4 a gallon.
"It's a significant problem," said Mike Rud, director of the North Dakota Petroleum Marketers Association. "In some of the outlying rural areas, this might be the only pump in town that people can access."
One of them sits just outside the Windsor Bar, a tiny central North Dakota hamlet of just 14 people -- "the best 14," bartender Annette Wanzek says -- where customers may play pool for 50 cents a game and buy gasoline for $3.60 a gallon. The pump cannot handle a price higher than $4. The bar may temporarily display half-gallon prices and tell customers they must pay twice that amount.
Windsor is a few hundred yards north of Interstate 94, and the pump often serves more than a dozen customers daily, said Joyce Staloch, who sold the Windsor Bar last year and now works there part time.
The number increases during the summer's travel months, especially in August, when bikers heading for a huge festival in Sturgis, S.D., stop in, Staloch said. The community is also preparing for its 125th anniversary celebration in June.
The average Midwestern price of diesel fuel, which is in heavy demand by farmers during the spring planting season, nudged above $4 a gallon in early April, the federal Energy Information Administration says.
Nationally, the average price for a gallon of gasoline has topped $3.60, while diesel has been selling for an average of $4.14, federal statistics say.
North Dakota's Public Service Commission recently notified service stations that their mechanical pumps could display fuel prices by the half-gallon if a sign was posted alerting customers that they would owe twice the amount showed on the pump. Pump operators will have to install a permanent solution by April 2009, said Kevin Hanson, the commission's assistant director of testing and safety.
South Dakota's Department of Public Safety is preparing similar rules, said David Pfahler, the agency's director of weights and measures. In Minnesota, rural service station owners whose pumps cannot display the right price are being told to cover up the incorrect numbers.
"The consumer can only see the gallons turning," said Bill Walsh, a spokesman for the Minnesota Department of Commerce. "Then they just have to settle up with a calculator, basically."
About 167,000 stations in the U.S. sell gasoline or diesel fuel to the public, according to a 2006 count by the National Petroleum News, an industry publication.
Most stations have fuel pumps that use digital numbers and can be easily adjusted to accommodate soaring fuel prices, industry officials say.
But mechanical pumps that use internal wheels to show prices are still fairly common in rural areas that sell smaller amounts of fuel, said Robert Renkes, director of the Petroleum Equipment Institute, a national trade organization based in Tulsa, Okla. He estimates about 8,500 stations have mechanical pumps.
"We keep thinking they'll disappear, but they're still around," Renkes said.
Most mechanical pumps cannot display prices above $4 a gallon without the installation of a new computer unit that can go up to $9.99, said Pete Turner, chief operating officer for APS Petroleum Equipment Inc. of Anniston, Ala. The equipment costs about $350.
It costs less to change the pump to raise the maximum price from $2.99 to $3.99 a gallon, but that option increases the risk of a breakdown, Turner said.
"The computer that they're upgrading was not designed to go any more than what it's going now, and if you do it, they don't last long enough," Turner said. "They run so fast that the gears are wearing out."
Installing digital pumps would solve the price-display problem, but many rural fuel dealers do not make enough money to justify the expense, said Jeff Engel, the sales manager for Hobbs Inc., an equipment dealer in Mandan, N.D.
"They can't afford to put in $13,000 to $14,000 for a new gas pump," Engel said.
State regulators are handling the problem in different ways, said Judy Cardin, the chairwoman of the National Conference on Weights and Measures, an association of state regulators that is based in Rockville, Md. Cardin is Wisconsin's chief of weights and measures.
National standards agencies discourage the "half-pricing" that is being allowed in North Dakota and other states where obsolete fuel pumps are more common, Cardin said.
"Every time the price of gas starts climbing, we run into this situation," she said. "Definitely, in some of the states, in the more rural areas, they will continue to face it."
(© 2008 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)