Say I purchased 10,000 gallons of gas. How long could I store that underground? It would be in a steel container or divided into 50 gallon drums. Can I just bury that and come and get it when I desire?
Legally, a steel tank won’t do. You have to go with fiber glass. (They look like cocoons.) Not only that, it has to done by an EPA certified company. Oy.
Now, on to the fuel itself. Cycle World magazine claimed, in the early 1970s, that racing teams didn’t like to keep gasoline for more than 30 days. The reason they gave is that gasoline (petrol) degrades a little bit in a month. Most of us wouldn’t notice, but racers want to squeeze every micro-horse out of everything.
As most boaters know, gasoline has a decent shelf life of around 3 months. Much after that and it begns to gum up the works in unsued motors.
It’ll still burn, so duimping some on the ground and lighting it isn’t much of a test.
But it won’t burn the same in teh high-energy high-speed conditions inside the engine. You can run year-old gas through a clean engine and it’ll run, but it won’t tun very healthy.
They sell so-called fuel stabilizers to improve the shelf-life of gasoline for boats stored over the winter. It’s expensive enough that it’d probably offset any savings from buying fuel in bulk.
http://www.jackssmallengines.com/Gas_Stabilize.cfm is what I use, It keeps gas for a long time, maybe several months
So what causes fuel to change and can it be easily prevented?
Okay, now I’m worried. I always thought it was contact with air that caused gas to degrade, as in a lawn mower engine over the winter.
But I have some gas in 10-gallon gas cans (obviously unvented) from Hurricane Rita, back in September (October?). I thought I’d just put it in my car. Will it have degraded in a way that would mess the car up?
I know that where i live (pacific NW) the fuel at the stations during the winter months is more volatile than that during the summer. Lower temperature/ vaporization rate or some such nonsense.