LITTLE ROCK — Murphy Oil Corp. is making a move to sell power for electric vehicles, with a plan to add a charging point to one of its gas stations in Tennessee.
Murphy is collaborating with Eaton Corp., an industrial manufacturing company that develops electric-vehicle-charging systems.
The station will be a test case, allowing the companies to learn more about the market for public charging stations for electric vehicles and plan for future collaborations at additional stations.
“We’re in the energy business, we’re in the fuel business, we’re in the business of moving customers from one spot to the next. We’ve just got to understand how all that stuff works,” said Hank Heithaus, president of Murphy USA. “We want to get in on the ground floor and understand it, and then who knows what might take place?” he said.
Heithaus said while no plans have been made, both companies expect to “move forward together.”
Tennessee is one of five early launch states for Nissan’s electric vehicle, Leaf.The car will be available in California, Washington, Oregon, Arizona and Tennessee in December, and will gradually become available to the rest of the country throughout 2011. Tennessee will also be home to a Leaf production plant, planned to open in Smyrna in 2012.
El Dorado-based Murphy and Eaton will use the first Tennessee station as a model, to understand whether and how to add more charging stations to Murphy’s network of more than 1,000 gas stations.
While it can take several hours to charge an electric vehicle using a home charger, public chargers are more powerful and can fully charge a car’s battery in about 20 minutes.
What customers will do with that time, what other services they might use in the meantime, and whether they use the stations to fully charge their vehicles or just to top off are questions that Eaton and Murphy hope to answer.
Tim Old, business unit manager for Eaton’s electrical transportation infrastructure division, said a solid network of locations to charge electric vehicles away from home is important to combat “range anxiety” that keeps people from feeling uncomfortable buying electric cars.
“To really drive adoption, they have to feel comfortable that they can access charging stations that will charge or top up their battery in a relatively quick period of time, rather than having to completely rely on being tied to home base,” he said. “It’s a chicken-and-egg situation.”
Philip Gott, managing director at IHS Automotive Consulting, said having a network of public charging stations can help make consumers more comfortable buying and driving electric cars, but doesn’t necessarily pay off for charging-station owners.
“The experience has been, when a series of those charging points have been installed in cities or towns with an experimental fleet, very few people will use them,” Gott said.
Gott said it’s difficult to sell enough electricity through public kiosks to justify the cost without government funding.
The U.S. Department of Energy has provided $130 million through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to two companies that will provide free home chargers and develop public charging systems in some metropolitan areas.
But the joint venture between Eaton and Murphy would be privately funded by the two companies. Old said hardware for an electricvehicle-charging station can cost $40,000 to $50,000, not including installation.
Gott also questioned whether gas stations are the best places for public charging stations. He noted that in California, where there have been experimental fleets of electric cars, charging stations have been placed at shopping malls and parking lots, where people typically leave their cars for longer periods.
“What is it that [consumers] don’t like about their cars today? They don’t like going to the gas station,” he said.
Business, Pages 27 on 09/24/2010