Ask the Fuel Expert

Today the news is full of uncertainty in the petroleum industry with the ongoing political turmoil across the North African continent. What will all this mean for American energy's security in the long term? In order to answer that question we may have to start thinking about using an American Continental approach to resolve our seemingly never ending oil dependency on overseas crude oil imports.

There’s a clue to this year’s gasoline prices in last year’s pricing anomaly.

At the end of December 2010 the average price of gasoline in the U.S. was $3 per gallon, forty cents higher than the $2.60 per gallon price posted on the first day of 2010.

As an avid reader of all things oil, I occasionally turn to Bill Mann’s Wall Street Journal column, Bill Mann’s Canada. Recently, he reviewed results from a survey of American business peoples’ knowledge of Canada. And, as you might guess, the results were not pretty.

The piece caught my interest because my home, in Terry, Montana, is a long stone’s throw from Canada and my radio often gets better reception from Saskatchewan than from US stations, so I am up to the challenge. Here are some highlights:

Ask drivers how much fuel is used in their truck or equipment and the typical answer goes something like: “About $200 a week” or, “Four of five fill ups a month” or worse yet, “What do I care? My company pays for the fuel.”

Fleet managers cringe when they hear those kinds of responses because that information is meaningless to anyone other than the person responsible for monitoring that kind of information.

How many kilometers or miles do you drive in a week? How many liters or gallons does it take to fill your fuel tank each time?

Setting sustainability targets for energy use are of great importance due the threats to human society, economic development and ecosystems, which are caused by currently unsustainable human activities.

The dollar is posting gains this week with more bad news about sovereign debt, particularly in Ireland, and moves by speculative investors to the U.S. dollar as a safe-haven. In addition to that, the breakout of hostilities between North and South Korea has brought about more interest in the dollar. 



Californians soon could be paying up to $5 per gallon for their fuel due to low carbon fuel standards (LCFS) scheduled to be phased in as scheduled next year, after Proposition 23 was defeated on the November 2nd ballot by the voters in California. If the controversial ballot measure had passed it would have suspended the state’s climate change law (AB 32) until the unemployment rate went below 5.5% for a year.

People in Chile and the rest of the world held their collective breaths last week watching the rescue of 33 miners trapped in a collapsed Chilean mine. Engineers at Major Drilling Group International Inc. in Moncton, New Brunswick and two Pennsylvania companies — Schramm Inc., which makes the T130 drill, and Center Rock Inc., which makes the drill bits, special pride could be taken in doing their job well to effect this successful rescue.

You might not think diesel smells great but the folks at Diesel Jeans are hoping you’ll like their newest fragrance called Diesel: Fuel for Life. No, I’m not hoping someone will buy it for me for Christmas, I mention it because the name raises interesting questions about how much longer industry can expect to use diesel, what will replace it and when. But let’s start with where diesel came from.

The petroleum industry has been going through cycles of switching to producing summer to winter grade gasoline for about thirty years. This occurs in the fall and in the spring each year with refineries taking down some of their units or shutting them down completely. The industry term for that process is "going into a turn-around".

Restrictions became governmentally enforced after the Federal EPA set requirements for Reid Vapor Pressure (RVP) standards and the use of expensive oxygenates in the refining Reformulated Gasoline (RFG) during the high summer temperatures.