Not all gasoline is created equal Are you using a good enough quality

Colossus · December 6, 2016

This is an article from earlier this year put out by AAA. EXCELLENT reading. I'm a firm believer in top tier gasoline. Now more than ever, especially with all the supermarket gas stations out there offering discount gasoline. Note this is for gasoline only and not Diesel FUEL. (Big difference between FUEL and Gasoline) No such thing as a Top Tier Diesel fuel.

Ladies and Gentlemen- with today's direct injection engines which work MUCH differently vs engines in the past, getting the right kind of gasoline in there with the right amount of detergents is CRITICAL.

http://newsroom.aaa.com/2016/07/aaa-not-gasoline-created-equal/

Grumpy Bear · December 6, 2016

Gasoline is sold at ‘the rack’ where everyone buys. Chevron for example supplies the gas for Seven Eleven in the southwest USA. Just about everyone else there too. I ran the Cat Cracker there for some years.

Circle K, Kum and Go, Quick Trip and so on don’t have refineries. They have suppliers/refiners. Suppliers distribute to racks not stations. Think about it.

Those suppliers have government standards they must follow such as Reid Vapor pressure and D-86 distillate end points, octane ratings, RVP changes four times a year and at the rack, minimum detergent levels. It’s Federal Law. Gasoline, sadly, is more controlled in the USA than Heroin.

Like crude it moves from major site to major site in pipelines not over the road and there are no dividers in a pipeline. These pipelines have terminals to wholesale “racks”. Any refinery along its path has access to the pipeline. Any station along that path has access to that rack. Racks blend the final additive packages, fill trucks and trucks off load to stations.

No one is getting a special on small lot inline blending. There isn’t a special detergent supplier that caters to the small guys only to save the distributor or retailer a few penny’s. The retailer can request less of what everyone else is using but there is a minimum standard which is adequate. You think anyone is spending a single red cent then they are not forced too?

Direct Injection isn’t new nor are its problems. The invention of direct gasoline injection was by a French inventor, Leon Levavasseur in 1902. Merced’s has had it in use pretty consistently since the 50’s.

Caribou Oil was one of the last minor refiners I knew of in eastern Utah that supplied a very limited and very local market. Too small to even be a class four refinery. Another between Gallup and Grants New Mexico. Don’t think it’s privately owned anymore. Get a copy of the “Rocky Mountain Petroleum Directory” if you want the 411 on the who’s who in the zoo.

All the little fish and many of the big ones, Esso, Texaco, Getty, Sinclair, Conoco have been swallowed up much like MTD owns anything remotely resembling a lawn mower.

Think Royal Dutch Shell. British Petroleum or Chevron. There are no more small fish. There is no tiered refining. Not anymore. Just a few big ones. But there is some sly marketing going on.

newdude · December 6, 2016

Gasoline is sold at ‘the rack’ where everyone buys. Chevron for example supplies the gas for Seven Eleven in the southwest USA. Just about everyone else there too. I ran the Cat Cracker there for some years.

Circle K, Kum and Go, Quick Trip and so on don’t have refineries. They have suppliers/refiners. Suppliers distribute to racks not stations. Think about it.

Those suppliers have government standards they must follow such as Reid Vapor pressure and D-86 distillate end points, octane ratings, RVP changes four times a year and at the rack, minimum detergent levels. It’s Federal Law. Gasoline, sadly, is more controlled in the USA than Heroin.

Like crude it moves from major site to major site in pipelines not over the road and there are no dividers in a pipeline. These pipelines have terminals to wholesale “racks”. Any refinery along its path has access to the pipeline. Any station along that path has access to that rack. Racks blend the final additive packages, fill trucks and trucks off load to stations.

No one is getting a special on small lot inline blending. There isn’t a special detergent supplier that caters to the small guys only to save the distributor or retailer a few penny’s. The retailer can request less of what everyone else is using but there is a minimum standard which is adequate. You think anyone is spending a single red cent then they are not forced too?

Direct Injection isn’t new nor are its problems. The invention of direct gasoline injection was by a French inventor, Leon Levavasseur in 1902. Merced’s has had it in use pretty consistently since the 50’s.

Caribou Oil was one of the last minor refiners I knew of in eastern Utah that supplied a very limited and very local market. Too small to even be a class four refinery. Another between Gallup and Grants New Mexico. Don’t think it’s privately owned anymore. Get a copy of the “Rocky Mountain Petroleum Directory” if you want the 411 on the who’s who in the zoo.

All the little fish and many of the big ones, Esso, Texaco, Getty, Sinclair, Conoco have been swallowed up much like MTD owns anything remotely resembling a lawn mower.

Think Royal Dutch Shell. British Petroleum or Chevron. There are no more small fish. There is no tiered refining. Not anymore. Just a few big ones. But there is some sly marketing going on.

So if that is the case, then why are they able to pull samples from a pump, test it, and show a difference?

Dnt · December 6, 2016

Motor Oil is motor oil it all comes from dead dinosaurs right?

barry G · December 6, 2016

I only found one sly marketing..those Sams club gasolines.

winter gets serious, I found I was filing it with poop then.

I choose anything other than that. My dad is at 6million miles documented, in the trucking industry. Seeing ninny comments is unreal.

If you have new aluminum, don't even get high octane.. it needs the imperfection of perfect carbon.

direct, indirect, or the multimillion mile spider injection..

just go with it.

Any aftermarket cleaner is bragging about something. Many times the strength of paying 15 cents more per gallon.

I decided I like Lucas in my old iron. the slippery lube stuff takes too long to leave on the aluminums..and there is other versions instead.

To witness direct injection, variable timing, first year of an engine going as far as needing carbon cleaning will surprise me. Something will break before then.

Grumpy Bear · December 6, 2016

Fair question.

Crude oil is a mixture of hydrocarbons. A very wide range of hydrocarbons. The full gambit from C2 to Coke. It also contains some none carbon components that are along for the ride like some heavy metals and water and it’s minerals such as sulfur. Fluorine compounds. Think of it as thousands of decks of playing cards shuffled together. Then split among the various reserve fields about the earth.

In a standard deck there are four or each. But in our scenario above the count varies and it varies a lot from region to region. When it first gets to a refinery the pipeline enters tanks called decanters and the majority of the water is drawn off and the sludge is settled out. Then off to the crude unit where it is separated into “cuts” based on boiling points at various temperatures and pressures. The first two are the Vacuum column and the Atmospheric column. It isn’t distilled into discreet single component hydrocarbon chains but into broader groups. Like the duce though four cut and the five though eight and so on.

Within a single cut there are allot of bond variations. The easiest example is C2. Ethylene or Ethane both C2’s and have very similar boiling points at the same temperature. The more carbon molecules there are in a chain the greater the number of possible variations.

Crude generally has a range of C5 to C32 with traces of the C2 to C4 in solution in the “head” and a “tail” from C32 to coke. Gasoline is around the C6 to C16 range of aromatics. Jet fuel, kerosene and similar produces are in the C8 to C16 Aliphatic range and yes there is some cross. Nothing is pure. Mineral oil is in the C16 to C32 range. Read the Dino juice of lubricating oils.

There are within these ranges standard product cuts. Light straight run gasoline and Heavy straight run gasoline, Diesel fuel and natural kerosene.

These straight runs are pulled via distillation at the crude unit. The residual is feed to crackers, cokers, isomax units to have the longer chains broken into smaller ones. The effluent of these streams is one again distilled into heavy and light and diesel and a “top cut” feed to heavy ends where the C3/C4 is separated from the C5 and C6 and the C3 and lighter compressed for other uses.

Some feed streams based on overall refinery balance of components and octane/centane needs and amount of jet and aviation fuels plus heating oil’s route some of these to other units such as isomerization units and Rheniformer to rearrange the chains such as Butane to Isobutane or Pentane to Isopentane. Some break Benzene rings or remove sulfur compounds. Whatever the refinery needs to meet its commitment to total barrel usage. Un-crackable makes asphalt for example. C2’s and some C3/4 are piped to light gas plants to make things like 99.9% pure ethylene for plastics reactions. That is a really tall column.

Knowing what is in a cut is partly the job of GC unit testing and weathering test and D-86 and other distillation test.

Gasoline is a ‘cut’ or range of hydrocarbons whose envelope range is defined but varies in actual number of cards with in that cut. Not huge but measureable. Variance comes from minute to minute as the process proceeds and the operations job is keep it between the ditches and in motion.

These component streams go to the tank field after caustic stripping to remove water soluble acids. where they are blended for things like octane and vapor pressure and checked for final sulfur concentrations. Some may be trucked to the rack if close enough but most is feed to the pipeline.

Ever see “refining row” in Texas? El Segundo California? Perth Amboy New Jersey? They don’t all have their own dedicated pipelines. Once at the rack the final additive packages are added. The end user may have a choice of a few or so and may request more than the minimum but like I said before. It’s regulated for minimums.

Adjustments are made about every two hours in the FCC to keep the buss on the road. Maybe ten refinery’s feed a single pipeline. Yes there is variation from station to station and from load to load at the same station. That same tank is filled from different batches from different streams every time it is filled even if it comes from a dedicated rack.

I think the mind set of most people is it is much like distilling alcohol from water. A simple two part process with a wide range in boiling points.

Refining and distilling gasoline is nothing like that.

So if that is the case, then why are they able to pull samples from a pump, test it, and show a difference?

Grumpy Bear · December 8, 2016

Supplemental information.

http://www.stevesnovasite.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-164646.html

You would have to be really old to have firsthand memory of all of this. I’m pretty old but not really old. Dad however remembers it all. We did have Sonoco and Conoco dial a blends in my time. Union 76 was a big player in the area of my youth as well. I started working for my first oil company in 70 for Hudson Oil of Oklahoma. One refinery is all they ever had.

The US never ran out of oil. It ran out of oil that was VERY profitable to produce next to the $10 import oil being flooded to the markets in the late 70’s early 80’s. West Texas Sweet Crudes were break even in the low $40 range Well before this time most majors were vertically integrated. Owning everything from the dirt to the pump head and it was during this time that there were some real differences between brands and even between the same brand sold at stations serviced by different company refineries that were feed from different reserves. Crude delivered to the refinery by horse drawn wagon in wooden barrels or along short wooden pipelines. Here’s some history on that.

http://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/oil-market-history-pipelines-wyoming

WW II was really the start of an expansive and universal piping system. The first two built by the War Department. Running from Texas to Jew Jersey. Allot different from this more current mapping.

Colossus · December 9, 2016

Jew Jersey?? Seriously?

Cowpie · December 10, 2016

Yes, for the war effort in Europe at the time.

sdeeter19555 · January 22, 2017

Yes, for the war effort in Europe at the time.

I can point you to the old trancontinental pipeline (if they haven't cut it up for scrap)...it was 2" screwed steel pipe mostly laid on the ground. Started in the "oil fields" of Pennsylvania...I've walked it many miles hunting.

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