What will gas stations look like in 2034? What will they be dispensing, and for what kinds of vehicles? How different will they look from today’s gas stations?
The answers to these questions depend largely on upcoming policy and what it will target, said John Eichberger, executive director of the Transportation Energy Institute. “If policy aims to reduce life-cycle carbon emissions and credit carbon reductions throughout the well-to-wheel lifecycle, then I think we’ll start seeing an enhanced attention on low-carbon liquid fuels,” Eichberger said.
The Future of Fuel
Policies that aim to reduce carbon emissions could mean biofuel blends will play a bigger role, as could carbon reduction technologies that can be deployed in oil fields, at refineries, at feedstock agricultural fields and at biorefineries to reduce carbon intensity of fuel, Eichberger said. “And to the customer, it should be transparent. No difference. It’s just a fuel with a low-carbon intensity, and that’s a positive thing.”
Jeff Lenard, vice president of strategic industry initiatives for NACS, said, “The best guess as to what the fuels ten years from now will look like is that they’ll look a lot like now, but with some variations. We may see a broader adoption of E15, for instance, into traditional gasoline. We may see more renewable biodiesel, addressing some of the issues related to carbon emissions reduction.”
In Europe, Lenard said, “There’s been a little traction in the way of e-fuels,” which he described as “essentially fuels that are carbon-neutral in how they’re produced, and they act exactly like traditional petroleum products in terms of how they’re dispensed.”
Among other potentially viable alternative fuels, Lenard said, “Hydrogen shows some promise.” But to date hydrogen availability—and therefore its use—is minimal and limited primarily to California, he said. While incentives are making hydrogen a little bit more affordable, it lacks a full-fledged fueling network. “For consumers to become dependent on an alternative source that’s not gasoline or diesel, they must be really comfortable with where they can get it,” Lenard said.
Hydrogen shows some promise.”
Too much customer choice can backfire, Lenard pointed out. “If there are somehow ten different fuels that are relatively popular, it’s going to be very difficult for anybody to sell all of them very well,” Lenard said. “It’s just too complex. You need too much land. It’s confusing to the driver.”
Because of customers’ desire to have certainty about “which fuels will be available everywhere, we’re not going to see many options,” Lenard said. “It’ll continue to be petroleum. It’ll continue to be EV. And the question is, will something join them or will it be a variation of those two?”
Evaluating EVs
As ongoing efforts to grow EV usage continue to make progress, their impact will continue to prompt changes at gas stations, Lenard and others said.
“You’re going to see a lot more stores with chargers on the side,” said Eichberger. “But with some notable exceptions I don’t envision that the forecourt with petroleum that we see today is going to be replaced by anything dramatic in the next ten years.” There are 280 million-plus vehicles in the United States and no technology is going to replace those overnight.”
For retailers in California or other jurisdictions where electric vehicle policies are “a little more assertive, it may behoove you to have a couple of chargers,” Eichberger said. Florida, New York and Texas are expected to be the next big growth markets for EVs, but EV charging “doesn’t replace your fuel pump,” he said. “It is an additional service.”
Adding that service means choosing where to place charging ports, and that involves multiple considerations.
“Do you put your chargers in your best parking spots or your worst parking spots?” Lenard asked. “If you put them in your best parking spots, what you’re doing is preventing them from turning over quickly because charging takes 20-30 minutes or longer. And you want those spots to turn over. However, if you put them in the worst spots, then what’s the incentive for somebody to get out of their car and go inside the store?”
Policies that aim to reduce carbon emissions could mean biofuel blends will play a bigger role.
He said it’s rare for drivers to go to a gas station and purchase gas without a canopy overhead. By the same token, “very rarely do you charge and find a canopy over you,” he said. “There’s still uncertainty about where chargers fit best. You don’t want to totally redesign everything. It wouldn’t surprise me if the charging site of the future looks more like a Sonic.”
Practical considerations—access to power being a major one—have long dictated decisions of where to place charging spaces. “Early on, the engineers would say, ‘Put the chargers close to the ingress of the power supply so it’s cheaper,’” Eichberger recalled. That approach reduces or limits the amount of conduit and tunneling required. “The problem is that’s usually out by the curb,” Eichberger said.
Many convenience stores that exist today were built in the 1970s, said Joe Bona, founder of Bona Design Lab, a company that designs convenience-petroleum retail sites.
Many of those businesses stand on smaller sites, with limited parking. If a site has eight spaces, and one or two are for employees, operators likely aren’t keen to give up three or four spaces for charging, especially when those spaces will be occupied for 20 minutes, Bona said.
A Wider Reach
Meanwhile, businesses other than gas stations are installing charge ports. Where and when drivers will charge their EVs and plug-in hybrids is going to change as charging becomes more widespread and much more convenient, said Seth Haas-Levin, vice president of marketing for the Grubbs family of automobile dealerships, which has six locations in Grapevine, Houston and San Antonio, Texas, and one in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Haas-Levin said, “There are a lot of customers right now who are EV owners who aren’t looking for a gas station” to get a charge. Instead, drivers of EVs look for chargers at their place of work or locations such as their grocery store. “We have a handful of employees who have switched to EVs because they can charge at work,” Haas-Levin said, explaining that Grubbs has installed 48 standard EV charge ports and four fast-charge ports across its dealerships.
In March the EPA issued new rules that were widely seen as favorable to hybrid vehicles. After the rules were announced, General Motors and Ford announced that they were re-committing to production of hybrids.
“Hybrids will continue to gain market share,” Eichberger said. “For the convenience retailer that’s great, because they run on gasoline. They’re more efficient vehicles, but they run on gasoline.”
Haas-Levin noted, “Based on how things are performing in the market, with EV sales as well as gas sales, we feel that a lot of the manufacturers are going to go towards the plug-in hybrid option.”
As to how all this will play out at the convenience retail level in ten years, Lenard said, “The only thing I can say with certainty is that the gas station of the future will be convenient, and that ‘convenient’ will be defined by the customer.”
Convenient, he continued, “is a combination of the cars that are being sold and car buyers’ comfort with their ability to keep the vehicle fully fueled or charged wherever they are.”
Bona discussed the possibility of an EZ Pass-like technology application that customers might be able to use one day. Such technology, he said, would automatically recognize a vehicle, the credit card attached to that vehicle and whatever other information it needs to register. “And you could just drive up to the pump, take the nozzle off, fill up and it’s automatically charged. And you just drive away.”
Even as convenience retailing adapts going forward, its basic mission remains much the same, said Bona. He remarked on the current popularity of the term “mobility hubs—it’s a different way of saying convenience store. It’s [about] finding those other opportunities to serve people when they’re going from point A to point B no matter what they drive, whether they’re charging or filling—and when they’re not charging or filling.”