Archive for December 2022
Breaking the Chains Part 2 – solutions for the Tier 3 gasoline octane-sulfur bottleneck
A meeting in Washington D.C. In June 2022, U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm called senior refining executives to Washington DC asking for their recommendations on how to increase gasoline supply from U.S. refineries. To our knowledge, the only recommendation coming from that meeting was to relax sulfur specifications on fuels, including the new Tier 3…
Read MoreBreaking the Chains Part 1 – How the Tier 3 ultra-low sulfur gasoline mandate is handcuffing U.S. gasoline production
A commodity that’s gone straight up While the stock market, crude oil, fuel prices, and cryptocurrencies have gone up and down wildly, the price of one important commodity has been quietly going straight up for years. That commodity is octane. Figure 1 shows that the retail price of octane, measured by the difference between the…
Read MoreU.S. EPA announces the U.S. gasoline pool met the Tier 3 10-ppm sulfur standard in 2021
The U.S. EPA has released the average gasoline sulfur number for U.S. gasoline in 2021. It is 10.04 parts per million (ppm) sulfur. This complies almost exactly with the Tier 3 standard requirement of 10 ppm. 2020 was the first year the Tier 3 standard was fully in-place and U.S. refineries over-achieved with a final…
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