Airplane Gas $ vs Auto Gas $

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400amps

Filing Flight Plan
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May 19, 2013
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400amps
Never could quite figure out why airplane gas goes up when car gas goes up but never goes down when car gas goes down, Its my understanding that there not even manufactured the same way, everything is kept sperate. In Minneapolis area there has recently been a closures of refinery due to annual things so everything went up substantially including avgas, well gas gas is dropping ,not avgas.
Does this happen in other parts of the country, or is it just dealers trying to get more profit. Sure would like to hear from a FBO owner who would give us the straight facts.
 
The fuel in the tanks was bought when prices are high. Takes time to burn up the high price stuff.

Why not burn car gas? :dunno:
 
Yeah but all the prices in the area went up about the same time (within days) of the big increase in car gas. Not everybody runs out at the same time.
 
Fuel resellers are notoriously unlucky. They always seem to sell out when prices are the highest, so their replacement inventory will always be even higher. The poor guys just can't catch a break.

400amps said:
Yeah but all the prices in the area went up about the same time (within days) of the big increase in car gas. Not everybody runs out at the same time.
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AvGas lags about 6 months behind car gas in most places. Watch the trend, wait, and see. Some FBOs will take advantage of the situation and raise prices unnecessarily just because they can.

I'll give an example. When car gas first hit $4/gallon a few years ago, I was able to buy premium unleaded and 100LL for the same price in my area. Then 100LL went up to about $6/gallon. Car gas went down, and AvGas went down to $5ish locally, and crept back up with car gas. Again, about a 6 month lag there.

It's also region dependent. I've been able to find sub-$5 gas in Florida still. When I told my airport manager that (an honest guy who I trust) he said "I can't even buy it for that wholesale." So clearly there are other factors involved.

If you can legally burn car gas, then it's a definite consideration. Around here that would mean about a 30-45% savings, depending on the week. Of course, it's almost impossible to find ethanol-free around here.
 
I was working in "the south" the summer of 2005...I think it was 2005...when almost every refinery along the gulf was damaged and/or shut down by a hurricane...

Auto gas prices spiked and remained high all summer.

By using airnav, I bought 100LL all summer long across the south for less than auto gas was selling on the streets for. Sometimes substantially less.
 
400amps said:
It's my understanding that there not even manufactured the same way, everything is kept separate.
Click to expand...

Only kind of!

In my refinery,we have over 30 process units doing different tasks, and many of which produce a gasoline blending component. Altogether, we have 13 gasoline blending components, but we only can put four of those (the most valuable, it turns out) in avgas.

So the components are largely made the same way... but once they're in the component tanks, the blending process is different.

Mogas is blended in a multi-component blender, up to 13 components, with online analyzers, and computer control that tweaks the blend recipe in real time to keep the resultant tank on specification all the time. When we're done, we can sell that tank based on the accumulated analyzer data from the blender... that data is good enough, and in fact sometimes even more representative than grabbing a sample from the tank that may have stratified somewhat since blending. That blender runs at 6 million gallons per day.

Avgas is batch blended... we add the four components to the finished avgas tank in turn, then turn on mixers in the tank. The tank is then circulated through the lead plant, where the lead additive package and blue dye are educted into the circulating stream via a venturi; that keeps us from having to pump the lead additive, as it's nasty stuff to deal with.

When we're done, we sample the avgas tank, top, middle, bottom, and run the samples through the lab to make sure we're on spec. It usually takes four or five days to blend 4 million gallons of avgas; perhaps twice that long if the tank isn't on spec the first time around and requires correction.

To the OP's point... your corner gas station buys gasoline several times a week... your local FBO may only buy avgas every couple of months. The prices respond MUCH more slowly. In addition, it's not unusual for particularly smaller FBOs to have cash flow problems... so if they see avgas prices rising, they'll raise their sales price so as to have enough cash to refill the tank next time.

Paul
 
Auto fuel prices, in part, are set by trade on the futures market. AV fuel prices are set by the producer.
 
Ted DuPuis said:
It's also region dependent. I've been able to find sub-$5 gas in Florida still. When I told my airport manager that (an honest guy who I trust) he said "I can't even buy it for that wholesale." So clearly there are other factors involved.
Click to expand...

Oh, you poor guys, paying so much. We Canucks are getting hosed royally by comparison. The Shell dealer here sells 100LL at $2.25/liter, which works out to $8.50/US gallon in Canadian $ or about US$8.25/gallon.

$5. Or $6. Bah. Cry me a river.

Dan
 
Av gas goes up like a rocket and comes down like a parachute.the fbo has a line they have to make,you are paying for the fuel in the ground.
 
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