Dirty Fuel

Perhaps like me, when you buy gasoline or Diesel Fuel or oil for your furnace, you assume that while it is refined fossil fuel, it is a pure product, but your fuel is filthy. I don’t mean in environmental terms, we all understand that, I mean as a consumer you believe you are purchasing fuel that is clean in the way you assume your milk has no detritus in it. The fuel we purchase has a great deal of dirt in it, and I should have realized this, but only now as my basement sludge filled fuel tanks create grief for me have I realized we buy a pretty dirty product.

I grew up in a farm family and so I should have understood that fuel is dirty. Every engine that we owned from our lawnmower up to our biggest John Deere tractor had fuel filters on it. That horse-power rich tractor actually had two in-line filters and sure enough all the filters had to be changed from time to time. Since everything on the farm is covered in dirt and dust anyway I thought the filters cleaned the fuel again after getting dirty on our own place. Recent experiences teach me otherwise.

My father bought a polystyrene fuel tank that sits in the back of his truck. He uses it to buy diesel at the distributor and take it to the tractors on the farm. Previously we always had steel tanks for this kind of work, but like all newer tanks this is translucent so you can readily see how much fuel is inside. My father — a man who has been buying diesel all his life —was surprised to see how his tank turned black inside from the accumulation of sludge.

As a consumer I think the oil industry should provide cleaner fuel if they can. They are passing the costs on to consumers for fuel filters, service work on engines and furnaces and in lost fuel efficiency. At the very least the regulatory bodies that oversee fuel production and distribution should test fuel require a report on the amount of particles floating in out product. We require that information on water systems and while we don’t drink our fuel, our most expensive tools – engines – do.