In your position you should be able to get together with the managers or their reps of any of the major oil companies. I am sure that they would love to give you a run down of how it works. They usually have people that will even give you a tour and explain how there operation works if you set something up in advance.
Good idea, I haven't done this for some time. Back when I released oil and lube products I worked a great deal with Texaco and Mobil. I was at the Mobil distibution terminal and oil blending facility in downriver Detroit quite a few times. Funny thing is that that is one of the places I saw many different branded tanker trucks filling up at the terminal facilities and got some of the stories about how all the gas was the same and that the only differentation was the additive packages put in..... I'll have to dig up some of my old contacts and see what they can tell me now that I am smarter and know more what to ask...
I can assure you that in the mid-80's there were solvents and detergents lacking in much of the gasoline. Probably Shell (as long as you were getting proven Shell product) was still good. I know Mobil premium was still good for solvents and detergents during that time. The lacking part was not part of trying to do better, either. You may not have been exposed to it from your product's end but others had huge problems....er...ah....caused us huge problems.
You may think and contend that my stories are isolated cases and that the system worked great all the time. Depends on your veiwpiont, I guess. I saw so much of it and in so many places geographically that it was far from rare and far from random. When you have fuel lines rotting off of a particular brand of car with 50 and 60 incidents in the same exact city (and nowhere else for a thousand miles in any direction) and those owners bought gas from different brands in the same local area you quickly realize and believe that they were all getting the "same gas" from different suppliers. Maybe the peroxides contaminating the fuel (in that particular case) were part of that swill used to separate shipments thru the pipeline.... Whatever, the contaminants were universal and across MANY brands within the geographic area that coincidentally shared a distribution terminal. Like I said, this happened WAY more than once. Industry panels representing all the auto companies held symposiums on the problems under the aegis of the SAE. I was at the meetings and heard the problems and explainations....hence some of the info I provided. Which I still stand by.
