The home heating oil industry has a long and proud history, and Fuel Oil News has been there supporting it since 1935. It is an industry that has faced many challenges during that time. In its 77th year, Fuel Oil News is doing more than just holding
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12 APRIL 2016 | FUEL OIL NEWS | www.fueloilnews.com STATE BY STATE NEWS New Hampshire The Oil Heat Council of New Hampshire, based in Concord, chalked up three lob- bying wins recently, reported Robert J. Sculley, executive director. One was the defeat of SB100, proposed legislation that would have required oil and propane dealers to deliver fuel to cus- tomers that were in arrears. A vote to send the legislation for interim study "means that SB100 is still hanging around but 99% of the time this is a soft way of 'killing' a piece of legis- lation," Sculley wrote in January in a legislative update to members. Introduced two years ago, the bill would have made it a violation of the state's Consumer Protection Act if a heat- ing oil or a propane company refused to deliver product to someone that owed them money if the local municipality welfare office agreed to pay for a new delivery, Sculley said. Another lobbying effort is in support of SB 309, which calls for reducing sulfur con- tent in home heating oil to 15 ppm by July 1, 2018. The Council's board of directors has supported this initiative unanimously. "We worked with NORA," Sculley said. John Huber, president of the National Oilheat Research Alliance, provided data that the Council for- warded to a study committee in the state Senate, Sculley said. "We worked with the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services," Sculley added. "They were very much interested in the environmental impact and benefit of going to low-sulfur. "That was one of the reasons we wanted to do it," Sculley said, but not the only one. "We have a lot of 'border dealers,'" Sculley said, meaning dealers near the state line whose business extends into neighboring states. All of those states are scheduled to go to 15 ppm by July 1, 2018, Sculley said. "If we did not… then our border dealers would have had to have dual storage capacities to service their customers across the state line." The bill has passed the Senate, and is likely to go the House for a subcommittee hearing, Sculley said. "I believe that bill will pass the House," he added A House bill, HB1195, is "house- cleaning," having to do with pre-buy legislation that was passed two years ago after a dealer went under and there was concern that pre-buy customers would not receive fuel they had paid for. Sculley said the legislation prohibited marketing pre-buy during a "blackout" period from Nov. 1 to April 30. "But the real purpose was to stop the practice of sending out a letter after the first of the year with a [specific] price per gallon for the next heating season," Sculley said. To fine-tune the law, the Council is working for a change that would allow dealers to offer all of their services, including pre-buy, as long as it's a list of services without a specific offer for pre- buy, Sculley said. A d d i t i o n a l l y , s o m e d e a l e r s h a d residential and commercial customers coming to them during the blackout period wanting to do pre-buy for the next year, Sculley said. The Council is working to tweak the law so that if a customer makes such a request, a dealer can arrange the pre-buy, Sculley said. The revised bill was heard in the House Commerce Committee, and is to be put to a vote in the full House and then in the Senate, Sculley said. Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo signed into law in February a bill that imposes a toll on big-rig trucks traveling highways through Rhode Island; under a program known as "Rhode Works," the tolls are to finance a 10-year plan to repair dete- riorating bridges. Details are still to be determined, but Roberta J. Fagan, executive director of the Oil Heat Institute in Middletown, R.I., said, "It will affect some of our fuel dealers who have Class 8 trucks." An early ver- sion of the bill would have affected fuel oil trucks as well, but a revision narrowed the target vehicles to the larger trucks. Nevertheless, Fagan said, "We're opposed to any additional tolling or tax. We really do feel it's going to be an added burden to our businesses here in Rhode Island." But she pointed out that the state's roads and bridges "are in desperate need of repair," having been allowed to deterio- rate over decades during which the state's Department of Transportation failed to perform maintenance. "This is not some- thing that occurred overnight," Fagan said. Federal records show the state has the highest percentage of structurally deficient bridges, the Associated Press reported. Rhode Island faces a high conversion rate to natural gas, in part because of aggressive marketing by National Grid, Fagan said. National Grid plc is a British multina- tional electricity and gas utility company headquartered in London and Warwick, United Kingdom, and operating in the U.K. and in the Northeastern United States. "National Grid is very aggressive with their advertising and I think the con- sumer is probably not completely aware of how long it would take for them to get the return on their investment if they were to convert," Fagan said. "The cost of natural gas and home heating oil are the same. So, if somebody wanted to con- vert right now it would just be ridiculous because they're not going to be saving any money." T h e I n s t i t u t e w o r k s t o e d u c a t e consumers on that score. "With the com- bination of our low-sulfur diesel and the biodiesel blend…we give people pause before they decide to pull the trigger and convert to natural gas," Fagan said. (For more on what the Institute is doing in Rhode Island, see pgs. 13-14 of the February 2016 issue of Fuel Oil News.)