You can store it but not very long, thats btw one reason why its not useful for private people to participate in wholesale/corp market: Even if you would get a small fraction discount for ordering large amount, you cant store that large amount long enough in your basement before it gets unusable (esp. Diesel).

Do you keep gasoline in your cellar? my understanding is that it goes bad relatively fast, so be careful to keep cycling it yearly at least.

African continent is probably the last place in the world where this is relevant, and they are on track to fix it.

If your refinery is taken out, it might take years to rebuild it.

> Most decent emergency / contingency plans will have the fire department, police or whatever local group show up at one or two designated gas stations to provide power, or require these stations to have on-site emergency power.

this is just nonsense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou...

while traveling i got caught up in this. no restaurants, no credit cards working, no grocery stores, no cell connection, no navigation with phone, no gas station. the goddam list goes on. fortunately this was less than 16 hours.

As someone who has actually lived through multiple major catastrophes where fuel couldn't get delivered for days and electricity was out for days, when the pumps stop working there is no gas. Don't assume the gasoline the police and fire department have will be there for you. It's there for the first responders. They don't have infinite supply. Their supply is extra expensive to handle compared to when things were working. You've now got many thousands of families all trying to get to the two or three operating fuel stations...trust me they're not open to the public! When you're out of gas, you're out of gas.

Meanwhile, those with solar panels not reliant on grid-tie, they can continue to charge their vehicles.

This is a good point, Florida EV drivers have already found that EVs are more resilient in a natural disaster because the grid infrastructure supporting the fast chargers comes back online much faster than service is restored to gas stations.

AFAICT americans are left on their own in the face of any kind of disaster. But, to be fair, in Europe we don't (yet) have the kinds of disasters that they have, so I can't say if europeans are left on their own or not.

I love disaster movies and they ocassionally lean into the idea of traffic being kind of bad in the event of a disaster. Deep Impact had a protagonist escaping biblical level tsunamis on a dirt bike.

Meanwhile the oil supply system is immune to outside threats

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_Pipeline_ransomware_a...

https://shippingtelegraph.com/shipping-news/adnoc-reports-15...

https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/08/1168121

> bad weather has been shown to take down power grids for entire regions for days, sometimes weeks

Where I live, we have typhoons which depending on the direction they arrive in can result in all the gas stations being out of gas for 2+ days. Meanwhile the grid keeps on ticking.

If they've taken down large portions of the grid for a prolonged period of time you're also not going to have much gasoline left.

> bad weather has been shown to take down power grids for entire regions for days, sometimes weeks

Once again, as someone who actually lived through those scenarios multiple times, when the gas pumps go down you're usually shit outta luck on getting gas.

When the grid goes down for days, the gas you have in your gas car + any random fuel tanks you have in your garage is what you have. Don't expect anything else unless you plan to take it at gunpoint.

Yes, buy crude on the black market and build your own refinery. Or you can run your own DIY fracking rig in your backyard. There must be some yt videos.

Are you suggesting we plan our global energy infrastructure based on attributes like "how well it fares in a post-apocalyptic barter economy"?