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Talk:2007 United Kingdom petrol contamination

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Silicone mis-information

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There seems to be an awful lot of misinformation in this story and I see that all the external links are to newspaper articles. Surely this is an opportunity for WP to clarify the real facts.

As the relevant WP articles go out of their way to emphasise Silicon and Silicone are totally different things. Silicon is effectively sand and a primary element used to make transistors and integrated circuits. Silicones are a wide range of organic molecular structures which are made from atoms of silicon in conjunction with a whole range of other elements - they are to silicon what hydrocarbons are to carbon. Their properties are totally different from metallic silicon and as far apart as 'chalk and cheese'.

If (as the trading standards announcement states) the problem is indeed silicon then it implies that there is sand in the contaminated petrol. I am sure this would cause all sorts of problems to the ignition system of a car long before it got anywhere near the oxygen sensors.

If as likely they are talking about specific silicones used as foam preventer additives in diesel then the effects will be far more subtle. I gather the problem is films deposited on the sensors which presumably would affect their performance and this could indeed be produced as after ignition products of silicones in the fuel.

Many questions arise. How did trading standards and others test the fuels - maybe with spectrographic instruments which showed a strong silicon line or maybe there are other techniques used in the petroleum industry. Some clarification is needed here. And surely it is just the garages saying the sensors have failed, because their test equipment shows that error. Are they really faulty, and did they really fail within minutes of filling up which sounds rather unlikely.

I am not an expert in cars or petrol but as an engineer sufficiently knowledgeable to realise that a lot of the stuff put out by the press in recent days is very duff science and unfortunately has 'fuelled' a scare which is completely out of proportion. Dsergeant 21:24, 3 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

As correct as your argument may be, Wikipedia does not report the truth, rather it reports facts that are 'attributable to a reliable published source'. See WP:ATT. Alexj2002 09:03, 6 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Unfortunately all the references cited are from the UK media. Whether you regard these as 'a reliable published source' is debatable. I would hope that in due course more reliable sources of the real facts are available. At the moment it appears very much a media led story with little hard facts. Dsergeant 09:42, 6 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

If you're looking for a more reliable source, Chemistry World covered more about the science of this story, though it doesn't answer some of the questions above: http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/Issues/2007/April/DesperatelySeekingSilicon.asp 135.196.89.95 13:31, 20 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

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During several automated bot runs the following external link was found to be unavailable. Please check if the link is in fact down and fix or remove it in that case!

--JeffGBot (talk) 19:23, 15 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

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