Abstract
The current debate on how best to generate, distribute and store electrical energy for motor vehicles is redolent of early attempts at distributing and storing petroleum and constituent products. Energy materials and fuels, such as hydrogen and petrol can be viewed as vectors - energy resources that are transformed to enable the transportation and storage of energy in different locations. They must be mined, generated, converted and refined before being transported for use. The nature of this traffic needs to be clearly understood in terms of its attributes such as flash and boiling points, composition, density and much else, so that it can be classified appropriately for haulage. Pity the entrepreneur who requested planning permission for the first petrol station: a toxic, highly inflammable liquid that needed to be distributed to every town and village in the land. Yet this is exactly what happened all across Britain in the inter war years 1919-39. The problem of haulage and classifying complex petrol products remains.