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Global Partners buys, stores, and moves gasoline, diesel, renewable fuels, crude oil, and propane, then sells them to gas stations, wholesalers, and businesses.
Global Partners is a middleman in the fuel business. It doesn't drill for oil or refine it into gasoline — other companies do that. Instead, Global Partners buys fuel in huge batches and stores it in tanks, then trucks it out to the places that need it: gas stations, wholesalers, and commercial customers. Think of it as the warehouse and delivery system that sits between the refinery and the pump.
The company runs mostly on two engines. One is wholesale fuel distribution, mainly gasoline and distillates like diesel and heating oil, where it buys in bulk and resells at a small markup to retail stations and other buyers. The other is its storage and terminal network — it owns and leases tanks, pipelines, and port terminals that can hold millions of barrels of fuel, and it earns fees both from its own trading and from third parties who pay to store or move product through those assets. It also has a fast-growing renewable fuels business, blending ethanol and biodiesel into the fuel supply and selling credits tied to clean-fuel regulations. Its terminals sit in strategic spots — along the East Coast, in the Northeast, and in key port and pipeline hubs — which matters because fuel is expensive to move and location is everything. A terminal near a busy harbor can receive fuel by ship and send it out by truck, giving Global Partners a toll-booth-like position. Its customers include Shell, BP, and ExxonMobil branded stations, chains, and independent operators who need reliable supply, plus commercial users like trucking fleets and home heating suppliers.
Global Partners is structured as a master limited partnership, which means it pays out most of its cash to unitholders rather than paying corporate tax at the entity level. That structure makes it attractive to income-focused investors. It has grown largely by acquiring terminals and fuel-distribution businesses — buying other people's storage and customer relationships rather than building from scratch — and it has benefited from the shift toward lower-carbon fuels, where regulation creates both complexity and profit opportunity for companies that know how to blend and trade. The risks are real: fuel margins are thin, and when demand drops or prices swing wildly, the middleman feels it.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026