Moving truck gas tank with large drill hole 1

Gasoline theft occurs when

gasoline Gasoline (; ) or petrol (; ) (see ) is a transparent, petroleum-derived flammable liquid that is used primarily as a fuel in most spark-ignited internal combustion engines (also known as petrol engines). It consists mostly of organi ...

is stolen from a gas station,

pipeline Pipeline may refer to: Electronics, computers and computing * Pipeline (computing), a chain of data-processing stages or a CPU optimization found on ** Instruction pipelining, a technique for implementing instruction-level parallelism within a s ...

or vehicle.

From vehicle tanks

People can siphon fuel from fuel tanks or use special devices to remove gasoline from the fuel tank. Fuel theft has shown to amount to as high as $2.1 billion a year in the United States of America. Vehicle tracking systems are sometimes used by companies to monitor cases of fuel theft and to raise effectiveness of commercial fleet fuel usage.

From filling stations

Gasoline theft (sometimes known colloquially as fill and fly, gas and dash, and drive-off in the US and bilking in the UK) is the removal of

from a station without payment. The thief will usually use some form of decoy to prevent nearby witnesses from noticing the lack of payment until they have left the station. Common decoys include pretending to press the wrong buttons after the

credit card A credit card is a payment card issued to users (cardholders) to enable the cardholder to pay a merchant for goods and services based on the cardholder's accrued debt (i.e., promise to the card issuer to pay them for the amounts plus the o ...

are swiped or having multiple people get gas at the same time, with one paying for another person and the other running off with both cars. With typical gas thefts costing station owners in the range of $50 per incident, many stores have fought back by installing better video equipment and requiring prepayment. Since the

oil price The price of oil, or the oil price, generally refers to the spot price of a barrel () of benchmark crude oil—a reference price for buyers and sellers of crude oil such as West Texas Intermediate (WTI), Brent Crude, Dubai Crude, OPEC Ref ...

increases after 2004, a surge in fuel theft has occurred, which has included license plate thefts (when gasoline is stolen with the vehicle having the original tags and the vehicle tags identifying the registered owner).

From pipelines

Oil and gasoline are stolen by illegal taps in petroleum pipelines, and billions of dollars worth of product are stolen annually. Targets are the

petroleum industry in Nigeria Nigeria is the second largest oil and gas producer in Africa. Crude oil from the Niger delta basin comes in two types: light, and comparatively heavy – the lighter has around 36 gravity while the heavier has 20–25 gravity. Both types are ...

, the

Nembe Creek Trunk Line Nembe Creek Trunk Line (NCTL) is a 97 kilometre, 150,000 barrels of oil per day pipeline constructed by Royal Dutch Shell plc and situated in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. "The Trunk Line is one of Nigeria's major oil transportation arteries ...

, the

Ceyhan-Kırıkkale Oil Pipeline Ceyhan–Kırıkkale Oil Pipeline ( tr, Ceyhan–Kırıkkale Ham Petrol Boru Hattı), also known as Yumurtalık (Ceyhan)–Kırıkkale Oil Pipeline ( tr, Yumurtalık (Ceyhan)–Kırıkkale Ham Petrol Boru Hattı) is a crude oil pipeline between Ce ...

, and the

petroleum industry in Mexico The petroleum industry in Mexico makes Mexico the eleventh largest producer of oil in the world and the thirteenth largest in terms of net exports. Mexico has the seventeenth largest oil reserves in the world, and it is the fourth largest oil p ...

. Organized crime and local people are involved. Illegal taps have caused leaks and explosions such as the following: *

2006 Abule Egba pipeline explosion The 2006 Abule Egba pipeline explosion is a disaster that occurred in the heavily populated neighborhood of Abule Egba in Lagos, Nigeria, on 26 December 2006, killing hundreds of people. There were originally believed to be around 500 deaths, but ...

2006 Atlas Creek pipeline explosion The 2006 Atlas Creek pipeline explosion was a disaster that occurred on 12 May 2006 at Atlas Creek Island (sometimes called Isanki Island), near Lagos, Nigeria, when a pressurized petrol pipeline that had been ruptured by thieves exploded, killing ...

2019 Tlahuelilpan pipeline explosion On 18 January 2019, a pipeline transporting gasoline exploded in the town of Tlahuelilpan, in the Mexican state of Hidalgo. The blast killed at least 137 people and injured dozens more. Mexican authorities blamed fuel thieves, who had illegal ...

References

Theft {{Crime-stub

From vehicle tanks

From filling stations

From pipelines

See also

References