FROM PIPELINE TO STATION: HOW GAS GETS TO YOUR CAR Once you’re talking about pipelines, you have one last place to look. We have no oil fields in North Carolina, and no petroleum refineries. Yet somehow, every gas station in my neighborhood has gas to sell pretty much every time I go to buy some. Nobody ever gave this a moment’s thought until Hurricane Katrina demolished the Gulf Coast, after which gasoline suddenly became very scarce and we heard a lot about refinery problems and pipeline repair down south. No gasoline pipeline comes to my door, but once I got to thinking about it I figured one had to come pretty close.             One does: Selma, North Carolina, is only thirty miles from Raleigh, and Bobby Massey, a driver for MTM Transportation whom I accosted while he filled the tanks of a gas station around the corner from my house, told me he drove his shiny aluminum tanker back and forth between Raleigh and Selma as many as four or five times a day. He was glad to chat, and he filled me in as he filled the underground tanks.             "Everything is aluminum," he said – wheel rims, structure, everything: when you’re working with gas, you avoid sparks. It’s much the same at the distribution center. Massey happened to be hauling gas for Citgo, but there are nine centers in Selma, he said. Because that’s where the pipeline goes. Just like with natural gas, pipelines lead away from the Gulf Coast, where oil is pumped and largely refined; crude oil pipelines stay largely in the center of the country, connecting the Gulf Coast with fields throughout Texas and Oklahoma as well as in the upper Midwest and refineries and ports on the Great Lakes. Products pipeline do much the same, though two pipelines swing east of the Appalachian mountains, curving through western North Carolina on their way north to New York. One – Colonial Pipeline – snakes a tendril east, branching to serve the counties near Raleigh, where it eventually leads to Selma. There, Massey explained, finished gas comes out and is taken by each of the many gasoline suppliers, who add any special ingredients and hold the fuel in tanks. One fuel follows another in the pipeline, by the way – regular followed by premium followed by something else, so the boundary areas require a little re-separating. (More sensitive fuels, like jet fuel, are separated from other fuels by a water-filled ball that functions as a sort of traveling bulkhead.)             Tanker trucks pull into to loading racks at the distribution centers, at which they fill their tankers – with everything at once. "See this?" Massey says, pointing to a seam on his tanker. "Each truck has compartments," each filled with a different grade of gas, plus diesel and kerosene. Diesel is the least flammable, so it’s always in the back of the truck, in case of rear-end collision – it’s also separated from the other compartments by a gap of empty space. Each buried tank at the station has a color on its lid – red for premium, white for regular, yellow for diesel – and Massey hooks up a vapor hose to the tank, then drops in the hose from the truck and starts filling. The vapor hose channels fumes back into the truck as the compartment empties, and he follows the same process at the distribution center, so the gasoline fumes not only don’t pollute the air but are reprocessed into gas by the supplier. Massey says a slow station, with 10,000-gallon tanks, might fill up once a week; a busy station might have 25,000-gallon tanks and run through three tankers a day.             "And if we have a hurricane and we can’t get no gas," Massey finishes up, "we go to Wilmington and get it off the boat."