94 ron

[Taily]

Partial quote:

I worked for years at a local service station and we often had fuel samples taken and were given a report of the breakdown of the fuel.

The standard unleaded always showed a lot of..... aromatics (yep, aromatics!)....

The 98 always showed 3 things; one colour, one aromatic and the rest was petrol. And the octane rating was always spot-on.

and:

Yep all petrol has aromatics added because petrol doesn't have a distinctive smell.

and:

.... If you look at the msds for some ULP it will sjow up to 5% Benzene. Not a good thing, Benzene is nasty stuff....

All one and the same thing (well almost, aromatics are a combination known as BTX - Benzene, Toluene and Xylene isomers), are extracted during cracking (catalytic reforming these days...) and are all present in our fuels these days in varying amounts. Benzene has a very sweet smell, toluene is a little less "smelly" and if you've ever smelt an "Artline" brand permanent marker you've smelt xylene.

All hydrocarbons, all very nasty. Mostly there to keep (or in the case of Benzene due to its Hydrogen content - C6H6) to raise the octane rating of the fuel, hence one reason you'll find more of it in the higher RON fuels.

Funny the snippets of this sort of thing you pick up hanging around and working at servos, in my case a mate owned/operated a Shell then a Caltex servo later on that I used to spend a lot of time in and around many many years ago.