Can Petrol or gasoline change color?

Answer 1

The answer is "yes". Several things can cause a change is the color of any petrochemical fuel. These include exposure to sunlight, exposure to heat, exposure to contaminants, the effects of additives by end-users, aging, and contact with certain metals and cheap alloys. There are some standardized tests for color stability, but they are limited in scope and rarely are useful in the context of everyday use. Despite many attempts by forensic labs, no hard data can be applied to date or specify the age of a sample of gasoline due to the vagrancies of fuel being mixed from one delivery point to another. Color changes can vary between becoming milky to yellow to dark red. Color changes to the darker spectrum, especially when accompanied by apparent changes in viscosity, tend to indicate fuel that will no longer burn efficiently in a combustion engine and will also usually present problems that include clogging metering jets by binding to small solid particulate matter not captured by a filtering mechanism and by coating or lacquering the metering surfaces and thus reducing fuel flow. Posted 05/23/2009 by Jerry King, TheShop@tampabay.rr.com