Gas Pumps

BLOODY SHAME about those high oil and gas prices. They're causing billions of dollars to be invested in petroleum production, which will increase supply. They're discouraging unnecessary driving, encouraging use of public transit and fuel-efficient cars and cueing industry to cut fuel costs, which will decrease demand. And they're triggering billions more to be invested in new technologies such as solar power and hybrid engines, which will offer alternatives. I hate to say it, but if this keeps up we might avoid a 1970s-style energy crisis, with its shortages, gas lines, severe recession and petroleum prices a third higher than they are now, adjusted for inflation.

Marty Giggard says it is bad enough that she has to live with noisy cars and rambunctious youths who congregate at the telephone booth at the Royal Farms convenience store on Fort Smallwood Road in Pasadena.She fears things may get worse if Royal Farms gets permission to convert part of its store in the Sunset Beach neighborhood into a self-service gasoline station."It's mostly the fumes from the gas that's going to bother me," Giggard said. "It's a health hazard."Baltimore-based Cloverland Farms Dairy Inc., which owns Royal Farms, has asked Robert C. Wilcox, the county's administrative hearing officer, to grant the company a special exception to enable it to add a two-pump island that could serve four cars at a time.

Developer Donald Reuwer didn't think proposing to build another gas station on U.S. 1 in Elkridge would be a big deal, and it's easy to see why. The U.S. 1 corridor in Howard County has long been the Fifth Avenue of fuel, with 15 gas stations along its central, seven-mile stretch. But the boulevard has more recently become home to something other than gasoline: grand visions of revitalization. After much talk about redeveloping the beleaguered U.S. 1 corridor, Howard County officials are taking action, and Reuwer's project is one of the first targets.

The price of crude oil jumped to more than $30 a barrel yesterday for the first time since the 1991 Persian Gulf war, and a sharp run-up in gasoline prices looks increasingly likely this summer. The price of crude oil neared $30 in mid-January, slipped and then rallied again last week. All the time, traders were weighing concerns about declining inventories of crude oil, home heating oil and gasoline against the possibility of a production increase from major oil producers when they meet at the end of March.

An off-duty Baltimore County police officer was critically burned while refueling his sport utility vehicle last night when a pickup truck ran into a pump at a Linthicum gas station.The officer, whose name was not immediately divulged, was flown by helicopter to the burn unit at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in Southeast Baltimore.The driver of the Ford pickup truck that struck the gas pump at Hammonds Ferry Citgo fled on foot after the crash but was captured minutes later about a quarter of a mile away, Anne Arundel County police said.

There's a war going on along gasoline alley in Millersville that mirrors one taking place on street corners nationwide. In the battle for customers, a half-dozen service stations and convenience stores are all trying to outdo one another to win the title of cheapest gas station. It's an industrywide price war being watched closely by motorists heading to Grandma's house for Thanksgiving this weekend, as well as by retailers, who are hoping consumers will forget their anxieties about rising fuel costs and hit the malls after loading up on turkey.

Amoco Corp., which became part of the largest oil acquisition yesterday, has its roots in Baltimore, where petroleum pioneer and Baltimorean Louis Blaustein established American Oil Co. in 1910 and laid the foundation for an industry.More than 88 years later, British Petroleum Co. said yesterday that it will buy Amoco for $53 billion in stock and assumed debt in a deal that would create an oil colossus with $108 billion in annual revenue.The takeover would be the largest of a U.S. company by a company overseas, eclipsing the buyout of Chrysler Corp.

For Timonium housewife Pam Baker -- who car pools four times each day -- it's more money to spend on groceries.For Andy Hoeckel, a 24-year-old carpet installer who logs 500 miles weekly to jobs in Philadelphia and Washington, it's lower expenses.And for commuter Mary Sue Orfuss, the gasoline glut that has pushed prices as low as 69.9 cents a gallon is sweet "comeuppance" for the oil companies."I love the low prices," Orfuss says, while filling up at a Petro discount service station on York Road in Timonium, where fuel is selling for 89.9 cents a gallon.

If you're Nick Joya and burn only a few gallons of gas a week in your car, then it's annoying but not a deal-breaker to pay $1.76 per gallon, about 3 cents above the average in Maryland - where prices have set new records each day for the past week. Joya filled up yesterday at a BP in Nottingham Square in White Marsh, and it wouldn't have mattered had he driven to the Exxon station a couple of blocks away, because it was also $1.76 a gallon. But if he had come on the weekend, BP's owner, Sam Kim, would have knocked off 7 cents a gallon.

Commission approves convenience store planThe Westminster Planning Commission has approved a revised plan for a convenience store with gas pumps and a sandwich shop to be built on a vacant lot at West Main and Carroll streets.Owner S. H. "Jack" Tevis won praise for a site model that showed a red brick building with an awning set back from Main Street at the northeast corner of the property.The design is an attempt to balance residents' requests for a building that would blend into the neighborhood with the logo and corporate design displays required by Shell Oil Co., Mr. Tevis' gasoline supplier.