Are Cellphone Carriers Like Gas Stations?
It’s a simple lesson from Kindergarten: Share. You probably don’t think of oil companies as being particularly good at this – except perhaps in the sense of sharing oil price hikes at the pumps – but it turns out they have another hidden sharing skill that they’d rather you didn’t see. They share gas and pipelines, run by pipleline firms called “common carriers”. Although not widely known, there is very little difference between the gas you buy at competing fuel stations in the US. The gas is a commodity product based on quality specs, and the differences are mostly marketing. The privately-owned national gas/oil distribution infrastructure is quite formidable (offering a massive legacy advantage over any future fuels). There are pipelines that cross the country, refineries, trucks, equipment, tanks, catchments, reserves – all to deliver fuel to a growing economy (yes, growing…over the long-term at least). But it would be prohibitively expensive to build such an infrastructure for EA
