COVERING GAS STORIES

Okay...I admit it. Sometimes we may cover gasoline stories too much. But today's story was different. BP is shutting down a huge oil pipeline that supplies a gob of gas (official reporter term) to refineries in the Northwest. A bunch of that ends up going into our cars and trucks in Oregon and Southwest Washington.

I found the story interesting and challenging. Finding consumers to talk about the impact of price increases is easy. Finding industry insiders poses a bit more of a challenge. My day started with calling everyone I could think of trying to find an expert who knew how to make sense of the impact we'd feel here.

My first call was too the Oregon Petroleum Association. They have good information but the person I needed to talk with was out for a couple hours. Next I called Brent Dehart, a gas station owner I met a few years ago when I did business reporting here. Fortunately, he still has the same cell phone number and gave me his insight to the situation even though he and his family were vacationing in Central Oregon. Thanks for the info but I still need someone on camera. Brent knows everyone. I asked who he'd call. He pointed me to Carson Oil.

That company is a local success story. Its 50 years old, privately held and has 200 employees all across the state.

I called and asked for the owner, Lance Woodbury. He's out, I'm told. Rats! But you can email him, he checks that very often suggested the person on the other end of the phone. Okay. Worth a try. Moments later, a reply came from his Blackberry. Despite being on vacation himself, Lance took a moment to nudge me in the right direction, to Jim Weir, the company's Vice President of Marketing. Game over. Jim's been in the oil and gas business 49 years. He told me everything I needed to know, including an interesting tid bit about gas barges off the west coast waiting for buyers. When walking through the fog, its nice to have a guide.

Its still a bit dizzy-ing. The U.S. consumes 20-million barrels of gas a day. Oregon consumes 200-thousand barrels of gas a day.
The pipeline shutting down supplies 100-thousand barrels a day of oil out of an Alaskan system that runs a total of 850-thousand barrels a day.

And here's yet another fun fact, roughly 50-percent of the gas we use here comes from refineries in Washington State that get 90-percent of their oil from Alaska. Based on all that what is the average increase consumers will see at the pump and when will it hit?

Seems like I remember a story problem similar to this in high school. Or was it college? I'm pretty sure I didnt think I'd ever use that math skill.

I'm sure we'll all learn way more than we want over the next few weeks about how gas gets to our local stations-hang in there. And dust off your calculators, I may need some help.

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