What happens to petrol stations when every car is electric?

“By 2030, the car market could be about 20% EV, which means there will still be a huge demand for fossil fuel,” says William Bannister, CEO of MFG, which owns more than 900 sites. However, by 2035, he expects EVs to represent 60% of the market, and the figure will be rising.

That’s why he’s already beginning the job of adapting MFG sites to offer rapid charging beside fuel, with the potential for the former to replace the latter as demand increases.

“We’re spending £400 million in the next few years to deliver this dual-fuel strategy,” says Bannister. “We’ve looked at 700 of our sites that we know can take dual fuel straight away, with 250 of them awaiting ‘energisation’. Our strategy is to do hubs: multiple, well-maintained chargers with good uptime – typically over 98% working – and which are safe and well lit.”

With a charging hub costing around £1m, many independents, unable to afford such an investment, will close. Still, like pubs, filling stations have been shutting up shop for a long time. In 1979, there were 40,000 filling stations, but that same year Tesco started selling fuel. Other supermarkets followed, and by the early 2000s around 400 independent and rural filling stations were leaving the industry every year.

Today, there are just 8400 filling stations, including around 1000 small independents – what the industry calls white-pole stations – in rural areas. BP reckons there’s still a 25% contraction to come.

You’d think their proximity to the stores would protect the supermarket filling stations, but even they are feeling the squeeze as the discounters increase their market share. In fact, MFG is in talks to buy Morrisons forecourts and establish more EV charging hubs as the supermarket seeks to raise cash and pay off debts.

The pace of change is taking even the experts by surprise. “Just a few years ago, who would have known the indies would be buying supermarket sites or that Covid would [make] demand for fuel fall as more people worked from home?” asks Petrol Retailers Association executive director Gordon Balmer.

“One of the biggest changes has been in shopping habits. For example, more frequent, top-up shops have replaced the big Saturday-morning shop for a lot of people. This is affecting supermarket sales but is an opportunity for filling stations.”

Anyone who has sat waiting on a forecourt for the driver of the car in front to do their shopping before paying for their fuel knows how that ‘opportunity’ feels.

“Twenty years ago, every street had an off-licence, but many have gone, and now we have them on forecourts,” says Bannister. “So now we’re the local off-licence – and the local Costa or Starbucks, and even the dry cleaners.”