Hormuz and ORD

[chim]

With the dwindling stock of off road diesel here and some craziness in the Middle East, it seemed like a good time to get refilled. In October 2023 ORD was around $3.91 and today the supplier quoted $3.08. The 150 gallon delivery coming will get me through about a year and a half depending on the grass growing, snow falling and little projects. With everything going on it didn't seem prudent to wait any longer.

 

[GeoHorn]

My “off road” supplier ….(Pinnacle…. greedy bassards) …is also unreliable. Last year they quoted almost $4/gal plus a $12 delivery fee….. When WalMart was selling Road-Diesel for $3.09.

I used the FEL,… picked my tank up and put it on a trailer and hauled it to town and filled-up.

I’ll pay the road taxes before I’ll continue to do business with Pinnacle (who has been my propane supplier for 30+ years) They’ve Lost Me Forever!

I switched to a little Mom-and-Pop propane dealer who beats them by 10-cents/gallon for propane anyway and put me on a ”keep full“ service… Whenever their truck is anywhere near..they top my tank off and charge it to me.

 

[jimh406]

No way would I keep diesel for a year and a half. To each his own though.

Oil isn't really moving very much if you look at the prices. Apparently China and Iran are impacted the most if Hormuz gets shut down. In any case, there is a ton of production that can be turned up the world over. As we know, oil prices are artificially high, so who knows what they will do over Summer.

 

[chim]

With some treatment I never worry. When I was working we installed large generators for hospitals, offices and treatment plants. Some had day tanks of over 100 gallons and main tanks as large as 5,000 gallons. Most of these were standby only and ran very little. I'm sure there are some gensets out there with diesel in their tanks that I had delivered in the 1980's.

 

[GeoHorn]

Diesel is not like gasoline, …it will keep fine as long as you keep water out of it, use biocide, and circulate it every few months. Sta-bil also makes a diesel preservative if you need further assurance. I have kept diesel for 3+ years and have never suffered any issues with 3 different vehicles. YMMV

<edit> Full-disclosure: My storage tank is a closed system and not open-to-atmosphere like most.…no chance of evaporative issues. (It is an air-compressor/pressurized system.)

 

[chim]

We did a pretty involved electrical project at a hospital in Lancaster back in the 90's. At one point we used the existing diesel generators to carry the load while the utility power was off. One of them shut down. Major scramble and investigation followed.

Turns out the generators (installed 10-ish years prior) provided power to most everything except the fuel transfer pumps. They were connected to "normal" power. Each genset had its own 100-ish gallon day tank. When the fuel level in the day tank reached the lower limit, fuel transfer pumps would refill them from the huge underground tanks. That all worked well for testing and exercising for years. The key was that they hadn't experienced a sufficiently long power failure to empty the day tanks. Until then utility power was restored before the day tanks went dry. They were kind of embarrassed to have thousands of gallons of diesel but none to run the generator. We never found out if the engineer or the installer screwed it up, but we got paid to fix it.