Mobil gas quality vs Shell

[Linctex]

Originally Posted By: 4WD
Base (per spec) gasoline is shipped further than that - includes tankers - the final seller must mix in their proprietary additives - please don't tell Alex Jones or Rachel Maddow


It all goes down the same pipeline.
A "plug" of water is placed between diesel, gas, kerosene, etc. etc. etc.

I knew a guy that worked on a "tank farm", and he said sometimes the plug fails and the products will mix a bit en-route to the tank farm.

Let's just say that "gasoline" is made of many interesting things!!

 

[ArcticDriver]

Originally Posted By: 4WD
Base (per spec) gasoline is shipped further than that - includes tankers - the final seller must mix in their proprietary additives - please don't tell Alex Jones or Rachel Maddow


In your post is the final seller the retailer or the final wholesaler?

 

[Nyogtha]

Originally Posted By: Linctex
Originally Posted By: 4WD
Base (per spec) gasoline is shipped further than that - includes tankers - the final seller must mix in their proprietary additives - please don't tell Alex Jones or Rachel Maddow


It all goes down the same pipeline.
A "plug" of water is placed between diesel, gas, kerosene, etc. etc. etc.

I knew a guy that worked on a "tank farm", and he said sometimes the plug fails and the products will mix a bit en-route to the tank farm.

Let's just say that "gasoline" is made of many interesting things!!


No "plug" of water between grades was ever placed on any pipeline system I ever worked with from 1986 forward, and it's a bunch of systems.

The terminals have zero facilities for treating hydrocarbon contaminated water, it all has to be trucked to a licensed facility or back to a refinery. There's a lot of effort that goes on to minimize water dropout suspended in hydrocarbon products at terminals including coalescing filters on some pipelines I worked with.

Sending a "plug" of water between grades on pipelines would be horrendously expensive in disposal costs, and would undoubtably throw diesel products otherwise on-spec when leaving the refinery off spec for Colonial Haze Rating, and jet fuel products off spec on MSEP (formerly WSIM).

Product interfacial mixing is slopped to a seperate tank called Transmix, then sent to either a Transmix fractionation facility or back to a refinery.

 

[Bgallagher]

Originally Posted By: Tdbo
Go to the cheapest one.
They have both been blessed by the "Top Tier" gods.
Or , run one tank of each,and see what the truck runs the best on. Let the truck decide which is the highest quality.


If I was going to do this experiment I would run two tanks of each to get a better idea. But I agree, both are blessed by the gods and are good companies' for fuel. I use either when filling up. No issues ever

 

[y_p_w]

Originally Posted By: Nyogtha
Originally Posted By: Linctex
Originally Posted By: 4WD
Base (per spec) gasoline is shipped further than that - includes tankers - the final seller must mix in their proprietary additives - please don't tell Alex Jones or Rachel Maddow


It all goes down the same pipeline.
A "plug" of water is placed between diesel, gas, kerosene, etc. etc. etc.

I knew a guy that worked on a "tank farm", and he said sometimes the plug fails and the products will mix a bit en-route to the tank farm.

Let's just say that "gasoline" is made of many interesting things!!


No "plug" of water between grades was ever placed on any pipeline system I ever worked with from 1986 forward, and it's a bunch of systems.

The terminals have zero facilities for treating hydrocarbon contaminated water, it all has to be trucked to a licensed facility or back to a refinery. There's a lot of effort that goes on to minimize water dropout suspended in hydrocarbon products at terminals including coalescing filters on some pipelines I worked with.

Sending a "plug" of water between grades on pipelines would be horrendously expensive in disposal costs, and would undoubtably throw diesel products otherwise on-spec when leaving the refinery off spec for Colonial Haze Rating, and jet fuel products off spec on MSEP (formerly WSIM).

Product interfacial mixing is slopped to a seperate tank called Transmix, then sent to either a Transmix fractionation facility or back to a refinery.

Sure. I thought that if anything was used to separate different deliveries, it would be a "pig".

 

[Nyogtha]

As long as a pipeline stays in turbulent flow, there's minimum interfacial mixing and various tenders move like big railcars with no end caps. When pipelines are shut down, they're typically shut down with one material (and one grade) filling the line.

I was peripherally involved in a pipeline shutdown where both gasoline & diesel were in the line. Every day Corporate HQ vacillated on how to handle the situation that caused this, the volume of transmix interface grew, and grew.

Some chemical producers such as Lubrizol pig their loading lines for barges / chemical tankers & rail cars before and after each grade, to ensure against cross-contamination and missed piping line-ups routing materisl somewhere other than intended. These are relatively short lengths of pipe between storage tanks and dock facilities, not miles of pipeline

 

[y_p_w]

Originally Posted By: Nyogtha
As long as a pipeline stays in turbulent flow, there's minimum interfacial mixing and various tenders move like big railcars with no end caps. When pipelines are shut down, they're typically shut down with one material (and one grade) filling the line.

I was peripherally involved in a pipeline shutdown where both gasoline & diesel were in the line. Every day Corporate HQ vacillated on how to handle the situation that caused this, the volume of transmix interface grew, and grew.

Some chemical producers such as Lubrizol pig their loading lines for barges / chemical tankers & rail cars before and after each grade, to ensure against cross-contamination and missed piping line-ups routing materisl somewhere other than intended. These are relatively short lengths of pipe between storage tanks and dock facilities, not miles of pipeline

In my industry "pipeline" means something else related to starting one process while another one is continuing. The idea is that processes move through a proverbial "pipe".

However, I get that most pipeline deliveries don't use pigs, but I was under the understanding that certain deliveries did use pigs to avoid "transmix". And most definitely using water would seem to be unlikely. Wouldn't water create a massive issue with corrosion? I thought that was one reason why most pipelines can't handle ethanol. And of course the most common use of pigs is for cleaning and diagnostics.

 

[Nyogtha]

Maybe there are tenders by pipieline that are bracketed by pigs, but not on any system I worked with. However most of my experience is with company owned pipelines, and getting product to common carrier pipeline transfer points rather than with the common carrier pipelines directly.

Maybe military grade jet fuels move that way. It's the only fuels cargo I can think of that may require bracketing with pigs. Even in the days of both leaded & unleaded gasoline moving down the same pipeline bracketing with pigs wasn't necessary. Switches were made so a little unleaded wound up in the regular leaded.

Water slugs between tenders would indeed be both an internal corrosion issue plus it would wash off all sorts of polar filming corrosion inhibitors deliberately added, as well as flow improvers - nicknamed slickum as a polite term, which are special polymers to reduce the coefficient of friction of the inner pipeline walls, allowing more flow without adding more booster pumps / pumping horsepower. These chemicals aren't cheap.

I had to counsel / mentor a pipeline group when building our line to Laredo; they'd pull me in to their routine stuff as their engineers tended to stay at HQ especially in the heat of summer. The field guys were complaining about all the dark gooey crud the hard pigs with huge amounts of wire bristles were pushing out, asking if we couldn't keep that crud in the refinery and out of their system. I explained they were stripping layers of filming chemical corrosion inhibitor and slickum off the walls whenever they did that and doing it more often just made things worse. They started using softer pigs and we were able to reduce refinery side pipeline chemical costs.

Now there's all these smart pigs that really help with pipeline mechanical integrity programs.

 

[Nyogtha]

Here's a couple of blurbs about transmix. I never dealt with a transmix facility, all transmix brought back to a refinery that's already configured to deal with crude oil finds transmix a piece of cake to deal with.

https://www.kindermorgan.com/pages/business/products_pipelines/transmix/default.aspx

These folks are a batchwise fractionator-for-hire.

http://www.alliedenergycorp.com/transmix/

http://www.alliedenergycorp.com/transmix-processing/

http://www.alliedenergycorp.com/transmix-sources/

 

[Nyogtha]

Back in my day of dealing with military grade jet fuels there was no low sulfur diesel (and no ultra-low sulfur diesel either). Those weren't bracketed by pigs but that was decades ago.

JP-4 was naphtha based, and would be butted up against gasoline tenders for transmix. JP-5, JP-8, and Jet-A (and Jet-A1) are kerosene based and would be butted up against tenders of diesel. JP-5 is high minimum flash point kerosene based fuel for the Naval Air Stations. Jet-A is for commercial use, with lower allowable flash point and higher allowable freeze point. JP -8 is lower allowable flash point like Jet-A but has a lower minimum freeze point than both Jet-A & JP-5. We made our kero such that it all met JP-5 flash (the most stringent) and JP-8 freeze point (the most stringent) simplifying jerking around Operations. Bits of jet fuel interface could be routed to diesel with no problems during switches this way back then.

Today's boutique fuels world is far more complex so while I don't have any experience with fuels tenders requiring bracketing with pigs, it's quite understandable there may be some fuels tenders that require such physical segregation today.

 

[y_p_w]

Originally Posted By: Nyogtha
Maybe there are tenders by pipieline that are bracketed by pigs, but not on any system I worked with. However most of my experience is with company owned pipelines, and getting product to common carrier pipeline transfer points rather than with the common carrier pipelines directly.

Maybe military grade jet fuels move that way. It's the only fuels cargo I can think of that may require bracketing with pigs. Even in the days of both leaded & unleaded gasoline moving down the same pipeline bracketing with pigs wasn't necessary. Switches were made so a little unleaded wound up in the regular leaded.

Water slugs between tenders would indeed be both an internal corrosion issue plus it would wash off all sorts of polar filming corrosion inhibitors deliberately added, as well as flow improvers - nicknamed slickum as a polite term, which are special polymers to reduce the coefficient of friction of the inner pipeline walls, allowing more flow without adding more booster pumps / pumping horsepower. These chemicals aren't cheap.

I had to counsel / mentor a pipeline group when building our line to Laredo; they'd pull me in to their routine stuff as their engineers tended to stay at HQ especially in the heat of summer. The field guys were complaining about all the dark gooey crud the hard pigs with huge amounts of wire bristles were pushing out, asking if we couldn't keep that crud in the refinery and out of their system. I explained they were stripping layers of filming chemical corrosion inhibitor and slickum off the walls whenever they did that and doing it more often just made things worse. They started using softer pigs and we were able to reduce refinery side pipeline chemical costs.

Now there's all these smart pigs that really help with pipeline mechanical integrity programs.

Yeah - I understand that. However, the claim that water plugs are used to separate deliveries just seemed a bit strange. I thought that keeping water out was critical.

 

[y_p_w]

Originally Posted By: Nyogtha
Back in my day of dealing with military grade jet fuels there was no low sulfur diesel (and no ultra-low sulfur diesel either). Those weren't bracketed by pigs but that was decades ago.

JP-4 was naphtha based, and would be butted up against gasoline tenders for transmix. JP-5, JP-8, and Jet-A (and Jet-A1) are kerosene based and would be butted up against tenders of diesel. JP-5 is high minimum flash point kerosene based fuel for the Naval Air Stations. Jet-A is for commercial use, with lower allowable flash point and higher allowable freeze point. JP -8 is lower allowable flash point like Jet-A but has a lower minimum freeze point than both Jet-A & JP-5. We made our kero such that it all met JP-5 flash (the most stringent) and JP-8 freeze point (the most stringent) simplifying jerking around Operations. Bits of jet fuel interface could be routed to diesel with no problems during switches this way back then.

Today's boutique fuels world is far more complex so while I don't have any experience with fuels tenders requiring bracketing with pigs, it's quite understandable there may be some fuels tenders that require such physical segregation today.

I'm not an expert on military fuels, but I do recall that JP-5 is also used onboard US Navy ships using gas turbine propulsion, which is essentially a jet engine modified to turn a shaft. I've taken a few tours of US Navy ships, and often they smelled like kerosene.

 

[OilSwag]

Originally Posted By: kschachn
Originally Posted By: john_pifer
Originally Posted By: sir1900
If price is negligible, choose Shell. V-Power doesn't contain ethanol.

That's not the case in the USA. All fuel now contains ethanol unless specified otherwise.

Yes, not all states require labeling for fuel containing ethanol, so it is possible that some E10 in some places will not be labeled. But for the most part in most states it is labeled.

And you are correct it is not brand nor grade specific. For example here in southeastern Wisconsin all fuel sold contains ethanol since we are in an EPA non-attainment area (even at the Milwaukee marina). Here, Shell V-Power has EtOH just like any other brand or grade but outside the five-county non-attainment area it may or may not contain alcohol.

To the OP's question however, how would one determine gasoline "quality" between different major brands?


Pure-gas.org shows Madison, Wis having close to 20 gas stations selling 91 E0 with a few updated recently. None for Milwaukee however. So is it just the one big city that doesn't allow E0. I would think laws would be more state oriented than city/county oriented. That sucks for ones wanting E0 though

 

[kschachn]

Originally Posted By: OilSwag
Pure-gas.org shows Madison, Wis having close to 20 gas stations selling 91 E0 with a few updated recently. None for Milwaukee however. So is it just the one big city that doesn't allow E0. I would think laws would be more state oriented than city/county oriented. That sucks for ones wanting E0 though

Yes, Dane County is not a designated whole-county non-attainment area but other counties are. All of Milwaukee county is affected as is all of Waukesha county. Other counties in southeastern Wisconsin are affected either in whole or in part. The closest E0 for me is in Walworth county (south of Waukesha) and that is a 20 minute drive.

 

[Nyogtha]

I live in the 7th largest city in the US, and you can see there are zero listings for E0 in San Antonio, and the ones in Houston, the 4th largest city in the US, are racing oriented.

I have access to E0 87 not too far from me in the suburb of Universal City at a relatively new Murphy station but I've never purchased any there. IIRC price rubs about $0.40 / gal. higher than standard up to E10 87, competitive with 93 "up to E10" here. Access to E0 is more common in areas with motorized pleasure watercraft here, and not in 93 octane. There's a wide region with specific fuel requirements based on air quality measurements here.

If you can remember those days (like me) originally unleaded E0 fuel was specifically found at marinas as Marine White. My dad used Marine White for OPE and I mixed my own charcoal starter fluid as a blend of kerosene & Marine White as a teenager.

 

[fdcg27]

I doubt that you'll see any difference with either.
I've used all sorts of different brands over the years and I have yet to see any engine run badly on any fuel.
The cars get whatever is cheapest that is convenient to our route of travel.
This might be TT Valero or it might be Krogier, Speedway or Mobil.
I will run a high PEA cleaner before an oil change maybe once a year if I think to do it.
I really don't think that there's any need to worry much about fuel quality or detergency.
OTOH, GM apparently thought that there was a need for better deposit control in some of their engines, so they developed the Top Tier deposit control standard, and TT is about measured deposit limits and not about detergent quantities.
You could look it up

 

[Boss302fan]

I live in Oconomowoc and head up to HWY 26(Johnson Creek exit) off of 94W to get my E0 fix... There are 3-4 gas stations right off the highway that sell E0...

 

[y_p_w]

Originally Posted By: fdcg27
OTOH, GM apparently thought that there was a need for better deposit control in some of their engines, so they developed the Top Tier deposit control standard, and TT is about measured deposit limits and not about detergent quantities.
You could look it up

Well sure. My thinking is that it's solely about meeting deposit control requirements and the test has to be run with a concentration that meets those requirements. For different additives that meets the EPA's deposit control requirements, one additive might only need 2x that to meet the Top Tier testing, while another might need 3x that. And of course going well beyond that level is where you start getting severely diminishing returns. I've even heard some claims that too high and it starts causing certain issues.

 

[john_pifer]

Originally Posted By: fdcg27
I doubt that you'll see any difference with either.
I've used all sorts of different brands over the years and I have yet to see any engine run badly on any fuel.
The cars get whatever is cheapest that is convenient to our route of travel.
This might be TT Valero or it might be Krogier, Speedway or Mobil.
I will run a high PEA cleaner before an oil change maybe once a year if I think to do it.
I really don't think that there's any need to worry much about fuel quality or detergency.
OTOH, GM apparently thought that there was a need for better deposit control in some of their engines, so they developed the Top Tier deposit control standard, and TT is about measured deposit limits and not about detergent quantities.
You could look it up

You're pretty much correct, except for GDI engines. For them, using top-tier fuel is a lot more relevant.