Safe handling and storage of petrol (gasoline)

Petrol deserves respect – and not just because it’s running out. Last month we went over the awesome destructive power the stuff. There are regulations about how you must store petrol, but it remains easy to catalyze disaster using perfectly legal quantities of petrol. (It’s why they’re suddenly so twitchy about passengers carrying liquids onto international aircraft.)

Click here for the full story on static electricity as a fuel fire hazard.

Here’s how not to dice with death using petrol.

safety, fuelJohn Cadogan5 November 2010 Comments

How the Human Race is Addicted to Oil

hink you’re not an addict? Think again

One barrel of crude oil – 159 litres – represents the same ability to do physical work as 12 big, strapping slaves toiling 40 hours per week, for a year. It is, literally, 25,000 slave-hours, gift-wrapped. You can whip it out of the ground in Iraq for about $1.50 and sell it on the open market for a 5000 per cent mark-up without falling afoul of the human-rights regulators. And you can do it about 1000 times a second, 24/7. It’s a business with real

fuelJohn Cadogan5 November 2010 Comment

Petrol and fire risk: How to avoid blowing yourself up with static electricity

etrol and static electricity don’t mix. Here’s how to keep them apart

Find out how NOT to make a Molotov of yourself at the fuel pumpStatic electricity is the commonest cause of service station fires. This is not because motorists are closet pyromaniacs - it's because many are unwittingly stupid. Most of us underestimate the wickedly destructive potential flowing from the massive amounts of energy locked into conventional liquid fuels

safety, tech, fuelJohn Cadogan17 October 2010Comment

Petrol (Gasoline) V Diesel

Diesel car sales have for years propped up a stagnant Australian passenger car market. In both the ‘private’ and ‘business/government/fleet’ sectors, petrol was responsible for the overwhelming bulk of the passenger car action – but petrol car sales have gone nowhere-to-backwards since 2005.

Diesel sales – we’re talking passenger cars here, not SUVs, 4X4s, light commercials or trucks – have grown more strongly than

fuelJohn Cadogan17 October 2010Comment

Natural Gas as an Alternative Fuel

Natural gas is a medium-tern solution to the demise of petrol ... but not the greenhouse problem

How would you like it if, perhaps in the future, your energy company delivered fuel direct to your door? You could refuel in your garage, or at the office. If we can home-deliver everything from groceries to roses – why not fuel? Think of the real estate it would free up via suddenly redundant servos; the time it would save. It’s not as if the service station experience is sentimental … being asked, ad nauseum, if you have a shopper docket, or Fly Buys, or if the notion of two-for-one Kit Kats appeals.

As a sweetener, how about if the home-delivery option meant – kilojoule for kilojoule – you’d get the equivalent of a tankfull of petrol for less than half today’s going petrol price?

fuelJohn Cadogan17 October 2010Comment