Would it help to ease the refinery capacity problem to go back to just 2 grades of gas, regular and hi-test?

Question

The refineries have to produce gas, deisel, aviation fuel etc. Maybe we could reduce the variety by one. Do we really need 3 octane grades at all gas stations?

Answer 1

No we don't.  It's gets worse that that. Because of government regulations, they have to make many different grades of gas around the country based things like, population density, air quality, local ordinances, w/ or w/o ethanol, and seasonally.  There's at least 40 different types of gas out there, and it's all being done without allowing the oil companies to build new refineries.  No wonder the price is going up.  When you limit supply, and increase demand, what did you think was going to happen?  

Most people (+80%), just buy regular anyway.

Answer 2

Won't help.

China and India are already using lower grades.

Answer 3

I don't think it's going to help -- what they do at refineries is separate the mixture of compounds into its parts.  A lot of the things you're probably thinking about are in crude oil already as it comes out of the barrel, and they're just separating it into the different fractions we want to use.  You can't really make more or fewer types of oil fractions if there are too many compounds already in there to start with, and you can't just say "this half is X" and "this half is Y", as a bunch of what's therefore in X would not be at all good for your car.

Gasoline can sometimes actually take extra processing steps to break up large, not-so-usable molecules into shorter pieces -- it's not necessarily even the easiest thing to "make".  There's some in crude oil, but not necessarily enough of it. . . so you split some molecules to make more of it.

Answer 4

We can have 10 different grades at the pumps from just two tanks. That is just a blending question, and it happens independent of the refinery.

Yes, we also have different grades of diesel fuel, so we may need 4 tanks.

But the solution to refinery capacity is really a reduction in total consumption, any and all grades. We could also have done ourselves a favor by making all cars need hi test fuel so that we use fewer litres of fuel. We can make all gasoline hi-test with addition of natural gas at the refinery.

It may be too late to correct that problem.

Answer 5

nope. it will not really help