Think A Repo Truck Uses A Lot Of Fuel? Check This Out

I was reading a few articles about the enormous amount of diesel being planned for America’s rapidly growing data-center industry and looking at some of the numbers being thrown around when something didn’t seem right. The claims were certainly attention-grabbing, but I wanted to know what the actual numbers looked like. So I started digging into planning documents, environmental filings and air-quality permit applications for some of these proposed facilities. What I found was considerably more interesting than the numbers I had originally been reading.

Before we go any further, this isn’t a partisan argument, and I’m not trying to make one. I have no idea what these numbers will ultimately mean for diesel supplies, prices, trucking, fuel availability or anybody else. I don’t know what will happen. I simply look at what companies are proposing, what they put into their applications and what government records show. Then I’ll let you decide what you think it means.

Let’s start with Amazon’s proposed data center in New Florence, Missouri. According to Amazon’s application to the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, the project calls for 483 emergency generators. Seventeen buildings would each have a 12,000-gallon bulk diesel tank, but that’s only part of the story. The individual generators would also have their own diesel “belly” tanks.

Based on the tank capacities specified in the application materials, the proposed facility could have approximately 3,347,541 gallons of diesel storage capacity.

Three million gallons is a difficult number to visualize. So let’s put it into terms that make a little more sense.

North Carolina school-bus garage planning guidance from the state’s Department of Public Instruction recommended 20,000 gallons of diesel storage for garages serving up to 300 route buses and 30,000 gallons for garages serving more than 300 route buses. That’s historical planning guidance, not a current nationwide requirement.

Using that 30,000-gallon large-garage benchmark, the proposed New Florence facility’s 3.35 million gallons would be equivalent to approximately 112 large school-bus fueling facilities.

Using a 20,000-gallon facility, it would equal approximately 168 facilities. At 10,000 gallons each, it would equal approximately 335 individual school-district tanks.

And then we get to the part that really caught my attention.

The Missouri application also provides manufacturer fuel-consumption figures for the generators. The largest CAT 3516E units are listed at 194 gallons per hour per generator at 100% load. With 476 of those engines, plus the smaller generators, the entire proposed fleet works out to approximately 92,848 gallons per hour at full load.

That works out to approximately 2.23 million gallons in 24 hours.

At 75% load, the calculated figure is approximately 1.70 million gallons per day, while at 50% load it is approximately 1.24 million gallons per day.

Those are calculated load scenarios, not a claim that Amazon expects to burn millions of gallons every day. The generators are emergency equipment intended primarily for utility outages.

Missouri isn’t an isolated example. A proposed Delaware data-center development known as Project Washington included 516 emergency generators, each with a 5,020-gallon diesel belly tank—approximately 2.59 million gallons of generator-mounted storage.

Delaware regulatory materials also documented the enormous physical footprint associated with those tanks. Project Washington ultimately did not proceed after Delaware’s Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control determined the proposal was prohibited under the state’s Coastal Zone Act. We’re using it here only as an example of the scale of diesel infrastructure being proposed, not as an operating data center.

An Amazon data-center project in Maryland documents approximately 661,300 gallons of onsite diesel storage, while Sabey’s Intergate Quincy project in Washington called for 57 main diesel generators with approximately 12,000-gallon attached tanks—roughly 684,000 gallons.

Here in North Carolina, NC DEQ has permitted Amazon’s Hamlet campus for 588 emergency backup engines, while Duke Energy has also been authorized to use 57 temporary diesel-fired engines to provide “bridge power” to the facility while its permanent electrical connection is developed.

Now, an important distinction: I don’t think it is accurate to say these millions of gallons are simply being “removed from the market.” Fuel sitting in an emergency tank hasn’t disappeared, and storage capacity doesn’t necessarily mean those tanks are always filled to capacity.

What the documents do show is that America’s data-center boom is creating large, dedicated private diesel inventories for emergency power generation.

And that’s where I think this gets interesting for the collateral recovery industry.

There is no official national count of repo trucks in the United States. The repossession industry is fragmented enough that even federal employment data and industry data produce very different counts. The U.S. Census Bureau reports 669 employer establishments in the specific NAICS 561491 repossession-services category for 2023. RDN has reported approximately 1,700 different companies recovering vehicles through its portal.

Those numbers illustrate why getting an exact truck count is difficult. Some recovery companies are classified under other industries, some towing companies perform repossessions as part of their business, and some companies operate multiple trucks or locations.

For this comparison, we’re using approximately 6,000 dedicated repo/recovery trucks as a working estimate. That’s not an official government count.

We’re also using a simple working assumption of 10 gallons of diesel per truck per day. Actual consumption can be substantially higher or lower depending on mileage, truck type, idling, towing and recovery activity.

At 6,000 trucks and 10 gallons per truck per day, the estimated fleet would consume approximately 60,000 gallons of diesel per day.

And there’s another way to look at it.

Our estimated national repo fleet would consume approximately 21.9 million gallons in an entire year using that 60,000-gallon-per-day assumption.

At the Missouri data center’s calculated full-load consumption of approximately 2.23 million gallons per day, that entire year’s worth of repo-truck diesel would equal only about 9.8 days of generator operation.

But there’s an important distinction here. The data center isn’t necessarily going to use that much fuel. Its generators are emergency equipment, and operating all 483 generators continuously at full load would represent an extreme scenario. Likewise, a repo truck doesn’t necessarily burn ten gallons every day.

We’re using the figures to understand the scale, not to predict actual everyday fuel consumption.

And this isn’t just about Missouri.

Imagine a major hurricane, ice storm, cyber event, grid failure or other prolonged outage affecting a region with several large data centers. Suddenly, emergency generators aren’t being tested for an hour or two. They’re running.

And they need fuel.

That means diesel has to move through the same basic supply chain used by everybody else—refineries, terminals, pipelines, tanker trucks, drivers, fuel distributors and local stations.

At the same time, hospitals may need fuel. Emergency responders need fuel. Utility crews need fuel. Construction and recovery equipment need fuel. Semi-trucks need fuel. Farmers need fuel.

And yes, repo trucks need fuel.

That’s the part of this story that interests me.

The issue isn’t whether data centers are somehow bad or whether somebody is doing something wrong. The issue is simply the scale of the emergency-fuel infrastructure being built and what that could mean for the diesel supply chain when those systems are actually called upon.

One proposed data center in Missouri could have approximately 3.35 million gallons of diesel storage.

That’s roughly the storage capacity of 112 large school-bus fueling facilities using the 30,000-gallon North Carolina planning benchmark.

And if its entire generator fleet ever operated at the manufacturer’s stated full-load consumption rate, it could theoretically burn more than 2.2 million gallons of diesel in a single day.

I started this investigation because some of the numbers I was seeing didn’t seem to make sense.

After digging into the actual permits and planning documents, I don’t think the question is whether the numbers are real.

The question is what they mean for America’s diesel supply chain as more and more of these facilities come online.

And frankly, I don’t know the answer.

But I think it’s worth asking.