Isaac-1
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- SW, Louisiana
Depending on location there is some truth to all this, I have a friend that worked in the quality control lab at a major refinery back in the 90's and over the years I learned a lot about gasoline, etc. from him. At the time he was there the whole RFG gasoline transition was going on with numerous RFG (reformulated gasoline blends being produced for emissions reasons). Everyone there HATED making RFG because the blend had to much more precise than traditional gasoline, and different markets had different blend requirements, at one time I think they were producing something like 17 different blends of RFG depending on what market it was being shipped to. RFG for the Houston TX market was a completely different blend than RFG for the Florida market, etc. Also making traditional gasoline is not like many of us imagine it to be, it is not this perfect blend of ingredients, instead it more like making spaghetti sauce from scratch with only a rough recipe guideline, too saltly, add a pinch of this, too sweet a pinch of that, too thin, too thick, etc. In the case of gasoline it is more like ooops we got the Octane rating off, pump in some butane. (this is the reason why in the old days you may recall sometime gasoline at the pump would smell stronger or weaker from batch to batch). By contrast modern gasoline blends are a lot less tolerant to such blending errors as there are fewer things they can do to reblend and fix mistakes and still meet the specs. At this time (pre ULSD Diesel) I know that Diesel, Kerosene, etc. was generally treated much less stringently than gasoline and therefore much easier to blend, basically if the viscosity was right, it was good. Still they made mistakes with everything, and some of them he told me about were BIG, refineries reuse / reblend everything they can, so even if a blend is perfect they may mix in a little of an off blend batch to dispose of it and what they can't tends to get burned off in their flares, and often the things they should not be burning get burned off in the early morning hours. (go drive by any refinery and watch all the interesting flare colors during the early morning hours, hmmm how do you get a purple flame 40 feet tall....). One of the more memorable mistake he told me about that got caught a bit too late involved a summer engineering intern that made a math mistake blending RFG, and ended up putting 10 times too much of something into the blend. The short description he gave me of this incident when it happened was, we sent 3 million gallons of RFG to Florida in the pipeline and 3 million gallons came back.
Ike
Ike
but as you can see they also list the price / 26Gl tank that the others would cost and there are cheaper alternatives, but their performance is also lower.
