Method and system for blending and dispensing fuels

Abstract

A method and system for blending and dispensing fuels that makes it easier for a retail filling station (10) to provide blended fuels to its customers and that more effectively encourages customers to purchase the blended fuels. Gasoline and additives such as ethanol are received and stored in separate tanks (12-18) at the filling station. Customers of the filling station are then allowed to select the amount of additive, if any, to add to their gasoline. Once a selection has been made, a proportioner (40) blends the selected amount of additive with gasoline at the time of purchase and then dispenses the blended fuel to the customer.

Description

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0001] 1. Field of the Invention [0002] The present invention relates to methods and systems for blending and dispensing fuels. More particularly, the invention relates to a method and system for blending ethanol with gasoline at a retail filling station so as to better encourage the use of blended ethanol fuels. [0003] 2. Description of the Prior Art [0004] Biomass fuels or biofuels are organic substances made from crops, trees, or even landfill gases that can be broken down into chemical building blocks and used as a energy sources to produce heat, fuel, or electricity. Ethanol, the best known of the biomass fuels, is distilled from corn and blended with conventional gasoline as a fuel source for combustion engines such as those found in automobiles. The use of ethanol as a gasoline additive reduces our nation's dependence on imported oil and provides an important new market for farmers and other grain producers. [0005] The United States government ther...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0009] The present invention solves the above-described problems and provides a distinct advance in the art of fuel blending and dispensing methods. More particularly, the present invention provides a method and system for blending and dispensing fuels that: 1) makes it easier for retail filling stations to provide blended fuels to their customers; and 2) more effectively encourages customers to purchase the blended fuels by providing more fuel choices and price incentives.

[0014] The present invention provides numerous advantages. For example, by receiving and storing both unblended gasoline and unblended ethanol and / or other additives at a filling station and then blending the fuels and additives as they are purchased, customers are allowed to select the exact amount of ethanol or other additive they wish to have blended in their gasoline. Moreover, even though any amount of additive can be selected, only one storage tank is required for each additive. This allows filling stations to provide customers with more fuel choices without purchasing, installing, and maintaining a separate storage tank for each blend of fuel.

[0015] Additionally, by blending the ethanol and gasoline at the point of purchase, the station can obtain the ethanol tax incentives and pass on the savings to customers. This encourages filling stations to offer ethanol and encourages customers to purchase more ethanol blended fuel, thus reducing our nation's dependence on imported oil and providing more revenue to farmers.

Problems solved by technology

Although these tax incentives encourage the use of ethanol blended fuels, they are not completely effective.

This arrangement, and the distribution of the tax incentives mentioned above, limit the use of ethanol for several reasons.

Petroleum companies do not want to reduce the demand for their conventional gasolines by offering cheaper ethanol blends and therefore rarely pass on the tax incentives to customers.

Therefore, the cost to purchase ethanol blended fuels is currently about the same as the cost to purchase unblended gasoline, providing no incentive for customers to purchase the ethanol blended fuels.

Second, because ethanol and gasoline are currently blended before delivery to filling stations, the filling stations must provide dedicated storage tanks for the blended fuel.

This is a problem because filling stations typically only have space for a few tanks and cannot easily add more.

Moreover, pre-mixing the blended fuel typically limits customers to one blend only.

Most filling stations do not have room for extra fuel tanks and therefore provide only one blend of ethanol fuel or none at all.

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