The Government’s
switch to greener petrol last month was a “major factor” behind the fuel crisis that saw forecourts across the country run dry, industry chiefs have revealed.
Retailers said they had already been “emptying their tanks as fast as we could” for the switchover to E10 petrol when a
sudden surge in panic buying quickly drained their remaining stocks.
According to official figures released on Thursday, fuel deliveries to petrol stations remained steady over the summer and throughout most of September despite warnings of a slowdown caused by a
shortage of HGV drivers.
Yet the amount of spare fuel stored at forecourts fell sharply by up to a quarter after Sept 1, when the Government introduced
greener E10 fuel as the standard unleaded petrol.
When motorists began panic buying on Sept 24, garages across the country found they did not have enough in their storage tanks to keep up with demand.
Brian Madderson, the chairman of the Petrol Retailers Association, said the data showed that the fuel crisis had been an “unintended consequence” of the Government’s switch to greener petrol.
“For weeks we had been emptying our tanks of E5, the old fuel, as fast as we could to get ready for E10. We had all run our petrol stocks down,” Mr Madderson said.
“So when the panic buying started, many of our members ran out pretty quickly. Then the shortage of HGV drivers meant we couldn’t get supplies quickly enough.
“I don’t blame the Government particularly but the E10 switchover clearly had an unintended consequence: we couldn’t cope with the surge in demand.”
Ministers rolled out E10, which is blended with a minimum of 5.5 per cent biofuel, as the standard unleaded petrol from Sept 1. Previously the regular unleaded was E5, although E10 has been on sale for some time in the UK and many European countries. The move was an interim step to help the UK reach its target of
net zero emissions by 2030.
Mr Madderson said some smaller petrol stations had been in the process of switching their storage facilities when the crisis hit because E10’s higher ethanol content can burn through rubber.
“That can take time,” he said.
Many fuel retailers including Asda have opted to sell only E10 at their sites. BP has said only some sites will be selling E5, while 200 of Esso’s 1,200 petrol stations are no longer selling the old grade.
According to the figures released on Thursday by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Industrial Strategy, deliveries for road fuel remained steady throughout the summer, averaging around 16,000 litres of petrol and diesel per station each day from mid-June to the end of August.
This constant supply meant that pump stock levels hovered at 40 per cent full, at most rising or falling by one or two percentage points in the same period.
Yet from Sept 1 onwards, forecourts across the UK began to see a steady and pronounced decline in fuel stocks, even before the shortages burst into public attention.
By Sept 16 – a week before panic-buying began – average stock levels had fallen from 40 per cent to 34 per cent. By Thursday Sept 23 – the day of a
notorious leaked BP warning that supplies were running low due to a lack of HGV drivers – stock levels were already at 32 per cent.
London and the East of England in particular saw the sharpest pre-panic-buying declines, with stock levels falling by more more than a quarter between Sept 1 and Sept 23.
It was not until Friday, Sept 24 that the stock crisis snowballed, with demand more than doubling. Having remained constant throughout the summer, daily road fuel sales lept from around 15,000 litres per station in the week prior to Sept 24 to more than 35,000 on the Friday.
By Saturday, Sept 25, pumps across the country were empty, with average road fuel stocks reaching a daily low of 15 per cent full.
“Whilst average sales for the last four weeks as a whole were in line with a typical week before the first lockdown (which started March 23 2020), there was a significant change to sales for the five days starting from Friday 24 Sept,” the BEIS document said. “Sales within the sample were up 80 per cent on the Friday and remained substantially above average volumes until the middle of the following week when they began to trend back to normal levels.”