The mayor stated that the rationing was needed to reduce wait times and long lines at gas stations. Flooding and winds from Hurricane Sandy damaged the petroleum infrastructure in and around New York City. Some refineries were shut down, terminals in the region were closed, and many pumping stations lost electricity. According to Bloomberg, most of the region’s infrastructure has been restored and the supply of gas in rising. According to the mayor’s office, the rationing will “ease disruptions and wait times for drivers attempting to fuel their vehicles.

“Last week’s storm hit the fuel network hard – and knocked out critical infrastructure needed to distribute gasoline,” said Bloomberg. “Even as the region’s petroleum infrastructure slowly returns to normal, the gasoline supply remains a real problem for thousands of New York drivers. Earlier today, I signed an emergency order to alternate the days that drivers can purchase gas, which is the best way to cut down the lines and help customers buy gas faster.”

NYPD officers have been dispatched to all open gas stations in each of the five boroughs, and will remain there to “maintain public safety.”

In an official statement, BP said it believes the gas contained a higher than normal amount of polymeric residue. The company admitted that the fuel in question could cause hard starting, salling, and “other drivability issues.” BP stated that it guarantees every gallon of gas it sells, and urges customers who believe they received some of the bad batch to call BP’s customer hotline. Anyone buying gas from Northwest Indiana BP stations or other gas stations during the past week may have been affected.

Presumably, motorists will have their vehicle repair costs covered by BP. This is assuming, of course, that customers can get ahold of someone at BP. The Consumerist is reporting that BP’s customer hotline is being flooded at the moment, causing long hold times. According to a local news report, the estimated cost for repairing one of the affected vehicles is around $1,200.

BP is now reviewing shipping records and contacting Northwest Indiana distributors who have loaded the bad product onto tanker trucks and replacing the bad gas. The company issued an apology, stating, “We would like to apologize for the inconvenience this has caused some of our customers.”

These days are long gone

A recent study revealed that 36% of people are now having to give something else up in order to just make it to work and back. Here is a breakdown of the lifestyle changes people are making:

“For many Americans who are just getting back on their feet, rising gas prices can be a tough financial hurdle,” said Jackie Warrick at CouponCabin.com, the company conducting the survey. “In addition to making basic lifestyle choices to afford gasoline, 75 percent of adults are making changes to their driving habits to lessen the blow to their wallet.”

Of the Three out of four of those surveyed that plan to make changes to their driving habits, 61 percent plan to drive less over all, 9 percent plan to carpool, 8% will ride the bus and 6% plan on buying a hyrid/energy efficient vehicle.

About one -in-four people have stated that they will take on credit card debt just to pay for gas in the coming months

The high price of gasoline is going to continue to hurt U.S. recovery. If you are giving all of your money to the oil companies, that leaves little to spend on products and services offered here in America.

“We saw a 6 fold increase in the share of US Internet searches for ‘gas prices’ last week and the term hit its highest peak since May,” reported Hitwise’s Heather Hopkins.  As a result, she “decided to focus on who is concerned most about rising gas prices using our demographic and lifestyle data.”

So what group led the way with its worries?  Old folks who were once able to pay $.25 per gallon?  Parents whose children might wind up spending $10 per teaspoon?  No and not necessarily, according to Hopkins’s look at GasBuddy.com.

Hopkins wrote, “Affluent Suburbia and Small Town Contentment, the two groups most likely, according to offline statistics collected by Experian, to own three or more cars were two of the three groups over-indexed on the GasBuddy.com website.”

She later continued, “The third group that was over-indexed on GasBuddy.com was Struggling Societies.  Households in this group were 164% more likely to be on the website than average for the online population – and accounted for 21% of the website’s visits in the past four weeks.  This group is more likely than average to own one small car.”

For the poorer members of our society, that doesn’t sound good.  On the bright side, it’s easier to improve the fuel efficiency of one small car than a fleet of luxury sedans.

Why?

Google has announced a joint partnership with Gilbarco–maker of gas pumps–that will see Google Maps on small screens at gas pumps.

Motorists will be able to scroll through several categories to find local landmarks, hotels, restaurants and hospitals selected by the gas station’s owner. After the driver selects a destination, the pump will print out directions. Eventually, Gilbarco hopes to make it possible to type in a specific address and get directions.

Google says they won’t display ads alongside the directions, but "participating retailers will be able to make extra money from other merchants that offer coupons on the service."

So, next time you fill up for gas. Look for the Google Maps on your pump, and say hi to my brother-in-law for me.

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The pumps manufactured by Greensboro, N.C. based Gilbarco Veeder-Root, will have an Internet connection and will display Google Maps on a small color screen. Drivers will be able to search through a number of categories to locate hotels, restaurants, landmarks and hospitals chosen by the gas station’s owner.

When a motorist decides on a destination the gas pump will print out directions. Gilbarco Veeder-Root wants to eventually allow drivers to type in any address and receive directions. "We think the service will create more customer loyalty for retailers," Gilbarco Veeder-Root spokeswoman Lucy Sackett told the AP.

The mapping service will not feature ads but retailers will be able to earn revenue from merchants that offer coupons on the service. Google principal business development manager, Karen Roter Davis said the company wanted to make its services available when people needed them the most. She called the mapping service, "sort of a Googley, more stealthy way of getting directions."

The doubling of gas prices over the past few weeks has people angry about seeing otherwise disposable income shift from their pockets to their gas tanks. Yet every other car on the road appears bigger than the average post-World War II starter home.

If people are concerned about gas prices, or alternative vehicles like hybrids, Hitwise analyst LeeAnn Prescott isn’t seeing it:

When prices first spiked in after Hurricane Katrina in September 2005, people went online to find the cheapest gas stations in the area and find out more about fuel economy, at sites like GasBuddy.com and FuelEconomy.gov. Now it seems inevitable – saving a dollar or two doesn’t seem worth the cost of driving a few extra miles.

The oil companies and the traders who have been gleefully bidding up oil prices over the past month have the upper hand. It’s their world, and we’d better be happy just to drive in it.

We must be pretty happy. Searches for ‘gas prices’ and ‘hybrid cars’ for the week ending May 12, 2007 were respectively 92% and 82% lower than it was during the week ending September 3, 2005, according to Prescott.

If the conspiracy theorists can be believed, we’ll see gas prices fall before the next Presidential and Congressional elections. OpenSecrets can tell you more about who’s enjoying oil & gas money ahead of those elections, in case anyone was wondering why America doesn’t have an intelligent energy plan yet.

Jerry Yang and I just announced at our quarterly employee all-hands that Yahoo! has committed to going carbon neutral this year. Essentially, that means we’re going to invest in greenhouse gas reduction projects around the world to neutralize Yahoo!’s impact on the environment. While doing our homework on this, we measured our carbon footprint and discovered that Yahoo! going carbon neutral is equivalent to shutting off the electricity in all San Francisco homes for a month. Or pulling nearly 25,000 cars off the road for a year.

I like that we’re able to quantify it in ways that are understandable to people, rather than talking about XXX tons of carbon emissions.

Personally, I’ve been paying a lot more attention to energy issues since last October when I wrote about replacing my home backup server with Amazon’s S3. Even though I don’t know that Amazon is able to do the job with less power than I can (I have to believe they’re more efficient than my setup), the eye-opening thing to me was the actual dollars saved from PG&E if my calculations were right.

Since that time, my home computers have been powered off much more of the time and I’ve actually seen changes in my energy bill. Plus, I replaced my dying 20+ year old furnace last December with one that’s 90+% energy efficient: the Lennox G61V Variable Speed Gas Furnace.

Again, lower bills and better for the environment.

Being that I live in Silicon Valley and work for a high-tech company, I’m glad to see that so much of the interest, funding, and innovation around greener energy is here too. I can only hope that more of the country follows along, just like they have with California’s stricter auto emissions standards.

Thanks to David, Jerry, and the Yahoo! For Good team for helping put our resources to work on this.

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Conducted by Gelb Consulting Group in February of this year, The Microsoft High-Performance Computing Oil and Gas Industry Survey indicates that providing geoscientists with the latest and greatest in computing technology could increase overall oil and gas production.

Gelb tallied results from over 100 oil and gas industry experts from around the world. Findings of significant mention from the study include:

·    Eighty-one percent report that more ready access to high-performance computing capability could increase oil and gas production.

·    Eighty-six percent have computing power at their deskside, and 69 percent prefer computing power at their desktops.

·    Sixty-one percent believe that having the capability to run additional tasks and iterations will reduce project risk.

·    Fifty-six percent prefer to schedule their own jobs to a technical computing or HPC cluster rather than refer to a cluster administrator to manage the job queue.

·    Forty-seven percent say their computing-intensive scientific applications require multiple iterations.

·    Twenty-five percent of computing-intensive scientific applications still take from overnight to more than a week to run.

“Since the mid-1990s, the upstream oil and gas industry has had the goal of achieving dramatic cost savings in the area of technical computing,” said John Elmer, president of Gelb Consulting Group.

“This goal is being achieved today. For example, it used to be the case that geosciences applications managers would not let go of their UNIX machines for mission-critical applications. The tide has now turned with smart-client PCs and applications reaching a level of maturity, reliability and stability that has caused even the skeptics to trust a move to Microsoft Windows.”

“This new approach to high-performance computing doesn’t replace supercomputers in oil and gas. Instead, it makes technical computing more available to more people at a lower cost,” said John Fikany, vice president of the U.S. Manufacturing Group at Microsoft.

“By using Windows Compute Cluster Server, geoscientists are empowered to more easily access, analyze and garner deeper insights from complex data and information — ultimately getting oil and gas from the subsurface to the pump faster, more efficiently.”

MapQuest believes they have a superior gas finder to the one released by AAA. The gas price search page MapQuest presents to a visitor has the search form, and a map of the US in the center of the page showing some sample prices around the country.

At press time, it was good to be in Hoffman, MN, to find the lowest gas price in the country, at $1.58 per gallon. Those who are there might not agree, as the current weather for the area is -6 degrees, -25 with the wind chill factored in as well.

Several features incorporated into the gas search service on MapQuest provide some extra usefulness. Visitors have the option to search for gas or diesel, but can also look for alternative fuels and their prices.

For the brand- and quality-conscious driver, MapQuest also lets one specify fuel type and grade, and to sort by brands. Our Doug Caverly, who would rather dump ground glass and battery acid directly into his car’s gas tank than use certain brands, should like this.

Mapping of gas prices has been integrated into the site’s capability to provide directions to a destination. Clicking on a search result brings that gas station into focus, and offers links to find directions to or from it.

I don’t know if I can recommend searching for gas prices on MapQuest after having been out in the snow this morning to get fuel. My search showed I could have saved seven cents per gallon easily had I checked MapQuest before heading out today. Darn it.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.