How does a gas station manage to serve thousands of cars multiple gallons of gas a day when the gas tanker trucks that deliver gas don’t look like they hold that much? How do gas stations manage to keep up with their demand?
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They hold a lot more than what you may think.
Think of it like this, volume grows way faster than length, if you double the length of a cube, it can hold 8 of the original cubes (you can check this by stacking dice), and if you cuadruple the original length it can now hold 64 small cubes.
A truck can hold much more than you would imagine if you only thing of the length or are change.
He average tanker contains 10,000 gallons of fuel and the average car is 15 gallons of fuel. Also a petrol station wouldn’t serve thousands of cars. They can do around 80 cars an hour which multiplied by 24 gives you 1,920 gallons. This is UK based so scale it to the bigger us stations and they may have 10-12 pumps which is still under the medium to bigger size fuel tankers which make up the average.
Cuz they do cary that much?
The underground tanks are bigger than one fuel tanker holds and they can deliver at all hours of the day. Tankers hold from 3000 to 6000 gallons of fuel, that’s a lot of cars you can fill
Becausw the tankers do hold that much. Theyre several thousand gallons. A car has what, a 15 gallon tank?
Those tankers hold a SHITLOAD man. That truck holds about nine THOUSAND gallons. For a 30mpg car that’s over a quarter million miles. That’s the life of the damn car.
Edit: to put it a different way, the average person in the u.s. drives 14000 miles a year. The average mpg for vehicles in the u.s. is 26 mpg. At 9000 gallons per tanker, each tanker you see on the road sustains almost 17 YEARS of driving for a single person.
Because cars aren’t being filled by the tanker trucks, they’re being filled from the underground tanks which have storage capacities in the multiple tens of thousands of gallons. [Here’s one manufacturer](https://www.zcl.com/en/storage-solutions/fuel/underground-fuel-tanks/) that makes tanks up to 50,000 gallons in capacity. Most gas stations have at least regular and premium, meaning they have at least 2 tanks (if not more). There could be hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel beneath larger gas stations.
To add to the large volume that tankers carry, many modern gas stations have a reader directly tied to the fuel storage to automatically send alerts to their dispatch when running low on fuel. If the station doesn’t have this, the store manager regularly checks the fuel levels to call dispatch if neededl. Source: worked IT for a fuel company.
Stations aren’t getting 1000’s of customers a day, they’re getting a few hundred. The underground storage tanks can hold more than a single tanker carries, and they have multiple tanks for regular/mid-grade/premium fuel. And they get regular deliveries of more fuel.
Our tanks way underground hold 30,000+ gallons. 10,000+ of each type we carry. Gas delivery is usually 2-3 times per week and they can offload 10,000-15,000 gallons. However they usually only need to drop off 1,000-5,000 gallons and hit another gas station on their route.
Sources: Gas station Clerk
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