Originally Posted By: Linctex
Originally Posted By: Falcon_LS
Although the U.S. EPA was the first to set detergent requirements for fuel (in '95 IIRC), the Europeans are definitely up there.
Great post!
Now, you just need to find out how much (and what type) of additives are in US "top tier" gasoline,
and then find out how much (and what type) of additives are in ACEA specification gasoline.
Is this published anywhere, or is it proprietary information ?
It depends on a bunch of factors. One is that often the brand rights may not even have that much to do with distribution. The Arco brand name is now divided. BP sold it to Tesoro but kept the ampm convenience store brand. They licensed ampm back to Tesoro. Tesoro then licensed Arco back to BP in certain markets (from Washington to Northern California). So there's even the possibility that the Arco stations operated through BP use a different additive than the ones operated through Tesoro.
For the most part, the sellers don't actually develop the additives themselves. Most are made by big chemical companies like Afton, BASF, Chevron Oronite, or Lubrizol. A few probably do develop in-house, like Chevron and Sunoco.
They can buy it off the shelf or even have a chemical company develop a custom formula (like Lubrizol does for Costco). There are oil companies like ExxonMobil and Shell that make it seem as if they've got all these chemists developing their additives in house. However, they have nothing on the EPA list of certified detergent additives. I remember when there was a certified detergent additive listed by the Infineum joint venture between ExxonMobil and Shell, but they don't even mention anything about detergent additives any more in their product information.
https://www3.epa.gov/otaq/fuels1/ffars/web-detrg.htm
And the "type" may not really matter. We talk a lot about polyether amines (of which gasoline additives aren't even the most common use) as the standard because that's what Chevron developed as detergents and where they publicized that well. There are other types (or combinations) of detergent additives. The most important thing is the type of additive, but that it's effective. There are Top Tier certified additives that are PEA and some that aren't. Top Tier isn't about chemistry, but performance.