This may be just the beginning of American motorists' year of discontent. This time around, it was Midwesterners who got socked by a fatal combination of thin supplies, new government regulations for cleaner-burning gas, pipeline failures and heavy demand. It travels 2 weeks on a tanker to the United States. Oil arrives at one of many Northeast refineries that produce gasoline blending stock for reformulated gas. Tank farms are used to store oil in transit, hold inventories and for mixing and blending gasoline.
Gasoline is blended with additives to make it burn cleaner.
Ethanol-blended gasoline is trucked to Midwestern states, and fuel blended with the additive MTBE goes to other parts of the country. This spring, for example, two major U.S. pipeline outages contributed to dizzying gas prices in the Midwest. In June, the Wolverine pipeline, which runs from Niles, Ill., to Jackson, Mich., sprang a leak, requiring gas to be trucked around the break. Then, just last week, a Sun Oil refinery in Philadelphia had a problem with a catalytic converter and had to slow production. Oil traders reacted immediately.