The Petroleum Equipment Institute (PEI) held its 2018 convention at the Las Vegas Convention Center from 07 to 10 October 2018. As usual, the PEI convention was held in conjunction with the much larger National Association of Convenience Store (NACS) convention. Today, I’ll focus on a few items that are particularly relevant to fuel and fuel system microbiology. I’m not going to attempt to provide anything approaching an overview of the entire convention. Instead I’ll report and discuss a…

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Biocide treatment releases biomass – now what?

Disinfection using microbicides is only one element of the fuel system decontamination process. This month’s post covers what needs to be done after a fuel system has been treated with a microbicide.

When a moderately to heavily contaminated fuel system is treated with an effective biocide, masses of biofilm material – flocs – get suspended into the fuel. As illustrated in figure 1, some of this biomass quickly settles to the tank…

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Take two gallons and call me in the morning – not!

In Part 21, I reviewed the three primary types of fuel treatment microbicides – classifying them by their respective solubilities in fuel and water. You’ll recall, that I recommend using products that are soluble in both fuel and water – what I call: universally soluble. If you don’t remember why I prefer universally soluble, fuel treatment biocide, please re-read Part 21.
In today’s post, I’ll discuss how to get the most…

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Fig 1. Microbes in fuel systems and the biocides used to control them – a) fuel (yellow-orange) over bottoms-water (dark blue), with red lines showing where microbes tend to accumulate; b) after treatment with water-soluble biocide (purple stars); c) after treatment with fuel-soluble biocide; d) after treatment with universally-soluble biocide. Where are the bugs? If you intend to use a biocide to disinfect a fuel… READ MORE

Fig 1. From Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798

Water, water everywhere…

Samuel Coleridge’s infamous mariner paid dearly for having killed an albatross (figure 1). Do fuel quality managers and personnel responsible for fuel system integrity pay dearly for underestimating the ability of small (<1 oz; 30 mL) pools of fuel-associated-water left behind after water has been nominally purged from a fuel tank? A water bit is any small volume of water that remains…

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