Originally Posted by FredR

About once in the last 30 years!

I happened to be riding my BMW motorcycle that night and it nearly froze the nuts off me! It can get down to freezing point in the interior far away from the coast. It has even snowed on the mountains that border Oman and the Emirates on a few occasions.

Gasoline blending pools in refineries are very fickle things and if the industry does not use such components to boost octane then invariably there are good reasons why. TEL got kicked out for toxicity as did MTBE and others. Gasoline blends vary according to climate and even the season. Refiners like winter time in cold climates because they can throw in more butane and thus get more bucks for their efforts. The last thing gasoline needs is any component that might freeze- that basically means in European climates that the components need to be liquid to at least minus 10C. This is not usually a problem with gasoline and is more an issue with diesel that has heavier components.

Originally Posted by 928S MN

Fred we're in the same business. 41 years in Oil Refineries all over the world. Closest I got to your location was some of the UAE Refineries. Can't agree more with your comments above. Spot on!!

Originally Posted by FredR

I started in refineries, realised how economically useless they were and went over to the E&P side of things. Later on I was offered the position of chief engineer at the local refinery that I held for 5 years until politics got in the way then rejoined the national oil company as head of projects for a chunk of their assets.

Interestingly Oman moved away from TEL just before I joined the refinery which is why my GTS has open loop fuelling rather than a closed loop with O2 sensor. The reason they did this was because Saudi Arabia built a shed load of MTBE plants that the US duly banned so the Saudi's tried to fob MTBE on the other GCC countries by getting lead banned- Oman went to CCR reforming and Isomerisation!