Making midgrade gasoline Old School style.

Midgrade is basically a simple mixture of premium and regular. Back in the day we used to make it on board by loading half a load of regular and half a load of premium. Generally it was either a 50/50 or 60/40 mixture.

Early on in my career these were a PITA because it usually involved 3 companies, the shipper the receiver and the transporter. We were the transporter.

Of course the shipper wanted to send out as little premium in the mixture to 'make specification' to save money. The receiver wanted his cargo to be on spec or greater and as a shipper I was caught in the middle.

Early on I learned to cut the regular short a few barrels and make up for the shortage with the premium and keep the percentages favorable for the  premium without making it too obvious.

You had to be pretty slick and the trick was that for a 50/50 blend you had to load 50.1% premium and 49.9% regular which would clearly 'make spec' but not be over too much to let the shipper accuse us of screwing up. When you did that you saved all of your worksheets to cover yourself.

Later on in my career the bean counters entered the fray and then all bets were off. We simply stopped doing gasoline blends because the bean counters came charging in and created problems where there were none to justify their jobs.

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To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY