Gasoline additives have detergents,
anti-oxidants, and corrosion inhibi-
tors, to protect an engine, Stellmach
noted. "Heating oil additives should
have detergents, anti-oxidants, corro-
sion inhibitors, to protect heating oil
equipment," he said.
Frey of Highland Tank, echoing
Stellmach, said, "What we're seeing today
with these new fuels is just different."
Before changes in composition of fuel
oil and gasoline, Frey said, if a marketer
was "ignoring the system itself, not tak-
ing any water out ever," he would have
problems. If the marketer was doing an
"average" job at water management,
Frey said, his tanks and systems might
be "okay." But an average job isn't good
enough now, Frey said.
An operator's experience and exper-
tise can help him evaluate a problem.
"If you've been doing this your whole
life," Frey said, "possibly you take the
filter off, you look in it and you see that
there's black gunk in there. You say, 'I
know what that is. That's sludge. I had
that problem before.' Or maybe you
look in there and see stuff that's red-
dish and you say, 'Oh, that's microbial
action. I must have gotten a batch of
microbes in there.'"
But most people who are operating
a fuel system aren't expert in fuel sys-
tems, Frey pointed out. "They operate
a bus company. They operate a truck-
ing company. And they happen to have
tanks and dispensers. It's not their life."
Therefore, once a problem is discov-
ered, Frey advised, "Talk to some sort
of tank cleaning expert or some sort of
liquid expert who can test the fuel and
see what's going on."
A supplier such as Mirabito, Frey
said, "is going to have two or three dif-
ferent ideas for who you can get to help
you fix it."
The changes in both gasoline and
fuel oil require marketers to adjust their
management of tanks and equipment,
Frey summarized.
Taking lead out of gasoline was "a
perfectly good idea," Frey said, but
"when we had lead in the gasoline we
didn't have the microbial problem."
Even though gasoline has been lead-free
for decades, residual leaded gasoline per-
sisted in the infrastructure, Frey noted.
"The whole infrastructure still had that
lead in it," Frey said: tanks, pipelines,
transport trucks. For the infrastructure
to cleanse itself "took 10 to 15 years,"
Frey said, "and so [now] we see some
things associated with that."
The same goes for systems that han-
dled fuel oil or diesel for years before
switching to ULS fuel, Frey said. The
liquid changed, "and we really haven't
changed the system," he noted.
FUELS
20 FEBRUARY 2015 | FUEL OIL NEWS | www.fueloilnews.com
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