Ration Time

Gasoline deliveries to all filling stations in 17 Atlantic States--and also in Washington and Oregon--will be cut 20% this Thursday. This time the order is no Harold Ickes false alarm. The oil companies demanded it, out of necessity, and they asked not a 20% but a 25% reduction. Filling stations may remain open not more than twelve hours a day, six days a week. This temporary restriction may soon become formal: every motorist in those States will then have to have a ration card.

Since Pearl Harbor, Eastern oil stocks have dropped 2,000,000 bbl. a week; now they total only 50,000,000 bbl.--about a month's supply in normal times. The oil shortage now, as it was last fall, is really a transportation, shortage, but this time it is acute. At the peak of last fall's oil scare, about 20% of the 300-odd tankers that usually ply the Atlantic Seaboard were on loan to Britain. Now tanker service has been chopped 45%, partly because of submarine sinkings, partly because of restrictions on tanker movements to prevent sinkings but mostly because so many ships have been transferred to war routes in the Pacific. Result: tanker deliveries are less than 900,000 bbl. daily against 1,600,000 bbl. a year ago.

This bottleneck would require much more drastic rationing than is yet in prospect, if the railroads had not come to the rescue.* Year ago the rails hauled practically no oil to the Atlantic Seaboard and last October they hauled only 141,000 bbl. a day. Last week they hauled 435,000 bbl. daily-a new all-time record and 40% above the rosiest estimates.

This record was not achieved because anyone ever found the much-talked-of cache of unused tank cars. It was accomplished by gathering all the tank cars formerly used for regional distribution (oil trucks are doing more short-haul work) and using them more & more efficiently. All tank-car trains now run on fast schedule from Texas to New York, from pipeline terminals in the Midwest to New England. To speed turnaround, tank cars are now spotted (i.e., switched to sidings) three times a day instead of once, unloaded seven days a week instead of five.

Tank-car freight runs 4-c- a gallon from Texas against 1-c- for tankers (including war-risk insurance and war bonuses for crews). Oilmen figure tank cars will add $120,000,000 to their annual transportation bill, some $90,000,000 more than the recent 10-c- a gallon price boost will bring in. So last month oilmen tried again for a West-East pipeline, got turned down as they did last fall, because the pipeline they wanted required 500,000 tons of scarce steel plate. But they refuse to quit, still want a fat 21-inch pipeline to move 250,000 bbl. of oil daily-about 17% of normal East Coast oil demand. The transportation cost: 3/4-c- a gallon.

* Two new southeastern pipelines are also helping --one from Port St. Joe, Fla. 456 miles to Chattanooga; another from Baton Rouge, La. 1,270 miles to Greensboro, N.C.

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