Are You Ready For Tomorrow's Fuels? (Are you ready for today's fuels?)

摘要

We hear widely varying opinions about the quality of today's heating oil. Apparently it depends on whether you are buying at a terminal or directly from a refinery—and whether you are buying pipeline product or fuel brought in by barge. Speaking as someone who frequently receives fuel samples for testing, I can say with confidence that probably 80% or more of samples received in the past 3-5 years have been of excellent quality. Now let me explain: People usually only send us fuel samples when they are having problems—filter plugging, system corrosion or some other fuel-side problem. If they are having problems, and yet the fuel is of excellent quality, how can this be? The answer is that their problems are not usually resulting from the quality of the fuel itself, but rather from water and contamination in the fuel tank.