Now and then, we all find ourselves complaining about fuel prices. That stuff can be expensive, especially if you’re stuck fueling up in a gas station in the middle of nowhere that can gouge you on the price. If you want to buy really expensive fuel, though? Head over to the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Yes, the government agency will be more than happy to sell you some incredibly expensive diesel, if that’s what you need. You can get a bottle of SRM-2723b, which contains 100 mL (roughly 0.1 quarts) of Number 2 diesel. It’s not especially good diesel, but that tiny bottle will set you back a full $530.
Putting that in context, a 2024 Ram 1500 has a 25.9 gallon tank. To brim that tank, you’d need 980 bottles of NIST diesel. In total, you’d be billed $520,000 to fill the tank. A Ford F-150’s 30.6-gallon tank would cost you over $600,000, and you’d have a massive pile of glass bottles to dispose of afterwards. I guess you could throw them in the bed? But let’s explore what’s going on here.
“Surely there must be something special about SRM-2723b to make it so expensive?!” you exclaim. You’re asking the right questions. SRM-2723b is a Standard Reference Material, specifically referred to as “Sulfur” in Diesel Oil. When you fork over $530, NIST provides you with 100 mL (0.1 quarts) of diesel with a tiny and precise amount of sulfur content, and a certificate stating that fact.
See, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has an important job when it comes to producing these reference materials, which are used widely in science and industry. These materials are not intended to be used for their usual purpose. For example, you’re not supposed to put NIST Standard Reference Peanut Butter on a sandwich. You could, but it’s real purpose is meant to aid in industry testing. When a company tests its own peanut butter for things like fat and sugar content, it needs a way of calibrating its tests to ensure they’re accurate. By running the same test on NIST’s standard peanut butter, for which known values exist, the test can be verified as needed. The organization itself explains the matter well in regards to the food industry:
Food manufacturers use the SRMs to calibrate their test methods and equipment. If their tests of our SRMs do not give them the answers that we say they should, they know that something has gone wrong with their tests and they have some adjustments to make. Once their results agree with ours, they know that their tests are properly calibrated and they can then accurately label their products with nutritional information and consumers can know that they are getting a balanced diet (or not, no judgment). When a company buys an SRM from NIST, they are really buying all of the measurements and scientific expertise that went into determining its chemical or physical properties, as well as NIST’s level of certainty regarding those measurements. After all, knowing how good your measurement is is as important as knowing the measurement itself, which is why NIST works constantly to improve measurement science.
NIST sells some 1,300 SRMs that help a variety of industries make sure they are meeting regulations or industry standards that help ensure the safety and consistency of their products, among other characteristics.
But the food and beverage SRMs can present unique challenges, in particular to NIST staff. Said one anonymous researcher, “I remember the trouble I had with the baking chocolate SRM. Never before during my sample prep had I wanted to ‘catch the drip’ on the lip of the beaker with my finger and eat it.”
These reference materials have to adhere rigidly to standards. To that end, they’re produced with great care, and assessed to ensure they contain precisely what NIST says is in them. This takes lots of lab work and testing, which is all very expensive. Combine that with the fact that there is only a very limited market for these materials, and that only small amounts are required, and you can understand why the cost is so high.
If you’re putting NIST standard diesel in your truck, for example, you’re effectively setting your money on fire. To that end, I’m not even sure NIST produces 26 gallons of standard diesel a year. Back when NIST used to put out a standard B100 Biodiesel product, it only produced one 55-gallon drum of the stuff. If you ordered a sample, you’d get five ampoules for 50 mL in total—the same size as a single American shot glass.
NIST produces a whole lot of these standard materials for all kinds of purposes. There are food standards, chemical standards, and even standard bullets for forensic purposes.
The one thing that disappoints me about NIST’s Standard Reference Materials? Most of the fun ones aren’t automotive-themed. There’s NIST Domestic Sludge, NIST standard cigarettes, NIST Baby Food Composite, and the classic SRM-1546a NIST’s beloved Meat Homogenate. Heck—you can even get frozen NIST standard urine, in both smoking and non-smoking varieties! I’m not even making that up!
What you can’t get are funny labelled bottles of “Standard Gasoline” or “Standard Diesel.” They’d make a gorgeous header image for this article and we could all have a few good laughs. But no, NIST has to make my life hard by not doing that. The organization actually used to produce a wider range of standard diesel and gasoline products, but most have been discontinued in recent years.
These days, the selection is more limited. NIST will sell you the aforementioned Sulfur in Diesel Fuel Oil, while a similar Sulfur in Gasoline product is currently restricted from sale. You can still get Diesel Particulate Matter, if that floats your boat. Meanwhile, the Lubricating Oil Additive Package is useful if you’re analyzing various types of engine oil.
There are a number of crude oil products, too, including Weathered Gulf of Mexico Crude Oil in Toluene, sampled from the Deepwater Horizon spill in 201o. That’ll set you back $1,310 for just 6 mL—one of the few fluids on earth that costs more than printer ink.
Unless you’re a chemist of the research or industrial variety, you’ll probably never come across these materials in your life time. Still, it’s funny to think about refueling a truck with some of the most expensive fuel on the planet.
Image credits: NIST
still cheaper than printer ink LOL
How much does standard reference printer ink cost? 😛
NileRed, a semi-famous chemist on YouTube (known for making Grape Soda from plastic gloves amongst other videos) bought and ate some NIST chocolate. As you can imagine, it wasn’t great but it’s an interesting thing to learn about. The baseline for all products coming from specific parameters that are set by the NIST.
He made a whole chocolate chip cookie – though now I don’t recall if that was NIST or a different pure benchmark. Either way, it was amusing to see how bad the cookie was.
I found this information absolutely mesmerizing. Great job Lewin.
$5.30/mL? Pocket change. One of the watch oils I use is $20/mL, that comes to $75,708/gal(US). And it doesn’t even come with a fancy certificate!
My partner works at NIST, and my favorite story of theirs is how we would be using the metric system, if it we’re for some meddling Caribbean pirates.
https://www.nist.gov/blogs/taking-measure/pirates-caribbean-metric-edition
Sounds more like we can blame the British because it was their Privateers and not true Pirates.
I am waiting from some super exclusive and expensive James Beard Michelin Star whatever restaurant to open called NIST. The food scientist tonight will be serving NIST peanut butter and NIST grape jelly on a pad of semi cooked NIST reference rice. $17200 a small plate, reservations by invite only…
A Youtuber named NileRed made a chocolate chip cookie using NIST ingredients. I don’t want to spoil the video, but the outcome was Not Good.
Thanks, gotta check that out.
I smell the potential for a fascinating and expensive YouTube channel.
Sure it’s a little pricey up front, but you make it up in fuel economy.
Pff, $5 for 1 mL? As a chemist I would say that is cheap.
A colleague recently bought 100 mg of carbon 13 labelled citric acid; about € 2000 (which for all intent and purposes is also about $2000). So a gram of citric acid is € 20.000, which would roughly be the same weight as the 1 mL diesel.
So let’s make lemonade. 1 lemon is 2-3 table spoons of juice, 8% of the juice is citric acid, that would be around 3 grams of citric acid in a lemon. Apparently you need something like 10 lemons for a gallon of lemonade. That would amount to 30 grams of citric acid, or € 600.000 for a gallon of lemonade. Oh, you want sugar in your lemonade? That’s only € 10.000 per gram for 13C labelled… At least D2O (heavy water) only costs €200 per 100 mL, so that will be cheaper then your diesel.
My colleague was a bit stressed when doing weighing, just imagine that you sneeze or someone bumps into you…
What’s the price for a pound of flesh? Or a pretty penny?
Well if the pound of flesh happens to be chicken and you’re at my local No Frills in Toronto, then it will cost you CAD$1.77 per pound.
https://www.nofrills.ca/print-flyer
I bought two packs today (about 7 pounds of the stuff).
It’s baking in my oven right now.
There was a case that went to a US Appeals Court which decided what constituted peanut butter. The whole issue too 12 years to resolve!
The funny part is that chances are they are not even making any money out of this.
The deal of the day from NIST is…. time–free time: https://time.gov/
Cue the YouTuber who buys 1000 bottles to fill his brodozer and do a half-million dollar coal roll.
If youre talking about whistling diesel, the 13 year olds/challenged adults that watch his channel wouldn’t understand the reason for this fuel so it probably wouldn’t get too many views.
I’m an adult and I hold a M.Sc. degree. I’ve been watching him for many years now. It’s just humor and can be pretty funny sometimes. I don’t care if he totals a few mass produced vehicles.
I’d laugh if they achieved it. I strongly suspect NIST would tell them to fuck off. Maybe you could get together a few liters by ordering some from NIST and a few units from other scientific suppliers.
$320,000 and 980 bottles? Please tell me I get a deposit back on each of them bottles.
Even once you get past calibration standards like the NIST sulfur sample here, fuels for research and development are expensive. For emissions certification we have to run an EPA-approved diesel fuel that is custom-blended by a few suppliers. The price fluctuates but it’s generally in the $10/gallon range (untaxed since it’s not a road fuel). And for other programs I’ve had to have fuels completely custom blended to get the right characteristics. in 55-gallon drums those cost $100-300/gallon. It can get really painful when you’re working with anything other than pump gasoline or pump diesel…
That reminds me of the era in in F1 where they were using pretty wild and volatile concoctions. Lots of toluene and other brain melting ingredients.
The purpose of this particular diesel reference is that all diesel sold in the U.S. needs to be “Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel” (ULSD). ULSD’s sulfur limit is 10ppm – exactly what this bottle is.
So you would use this to calibrate your production test equipment against.
This video is for you
https://youtu.be/crjxpZHv7Hk
And the antidote to that is Ann Reardon’s YouTube channel whcih debunks such videos. Here’s the one on that cookie that goes into detail about the “perfect” ingredients.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqYAWF7wd9k
Well, I don’t know if that’s a debunking, and I don’t think the ingredients were supposed to be perfect, they’re supposed to be a measurablely verified standard.
It’s the sort of like the difference between precision and accuracy, the expensive stuff is precise but not accurate. If something were perfect, it would be accurate, but not necessarily precise.
German manufacturers for example are all about precision, not so much accuracy ie there may be be a lot of variation in the parts, but the parts are selected to work with each other other.
The Japanese on the other hand are all about accuracy so that the parts may have an error, but they all have the same error, so matching parts is not as much of an issue.
This one’s pretty good too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esQyYGezS7c&ab_channel=Veritasium
Those must’ve been NIST eggs I bought this week.
I am now offering my standard non-smoking urine at half-price.
Because Black Friday.
Had somebody wanting to buy my urine once, I was tempted but only because I know it would have failed every drug test they put it through
Well there is this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist%27s_Shit
Selling for a quarter million dollars an ounce.
Pffth…No NIST Ham? (For my bumpers)
Also, no NIST shower spaghetti?!
It’s so American that the NIST SRM2387 for Peanutbutter isn’t straight peanuts.
Makes me wonder how each brand compares against the NIST standard for added sugar.
It’s JIF
Making peanut butter using only peanuts without adding sugar or salt or something else to modify the taste or texture is a modern thing brought on by health food stores and organic food crazes.
It’s really the sugar that is such an unecessary ingredient IMHO.
Kellogg’s initial patent (US Pattent 604493 granted 1898) lists water as an adder, and suggests salt and/or fruit other options for flavour and nutrition respectvely. Though was oddly called “Ailmentary Product” – maybe inline with Kellogg’s rather odd views of nutrition.
Interestingly, a separate patent (US Pattent 306727 granted 1894) calls out “Peanut Candy” where peanut paste (peanutbutter as we might now call it) is mixed with sugar.
So I would propose that sugar might have been an early additive, but it wasn’t referred to peanut butter, and would have been called a Candy even from the start.
What did they call peanut brittle?
If it’s what you are used to, the other stuff tastes really weird.
Crazy Richards! One ingredient since 1898! Not pleased they switched from glass to plastic jars. If you read almost any other label, they add @#$%& palm oil! That’s insane! There is already too much peanut oil when you grind!
You know the palm oil (and soy lethecin) is to keep it from separating, right?
When did stirring become a bridge too far? Palm oil has become ubiquitous in processed foods to the detriment of not only consumers health, but of the rain forest as well.
Stirring sucks.
Clearly you don’t drive a manual transmission then. 😉
Doesn’t everyone have an Ultrasonic homogenizer ?
I wonder if they have a chunky version that has a certain peanut percentage content?
“If you’re putting NIST standard diesel in your truck, for example, you’re effectively setting your money on fire”
Yore doing that with pump diesel too! And gasoline, natural gas, heating oil etc.
The difference is you get a lot less fire for your buck.
Man I hate getting burned on expensive fuels…
That’s partly why I like natural gas. Its so cheap sometimes people pay YOU to take it off their hands.
Oh not around where I live. You pay a little north of $40/mo for NG that was used a couple years ago (thx State of TX), then you pay for what you currently use.
Well there are a few caveats. You need to pick it up. You also need to take a LOT of it.
https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/latest-news/natural-gas/082124-negative-permian-gas-prices-set-record-stretch-as-matterhorn-startup-looms
I like that all the labels are standard, Oh. I should have been testing peanut butter, this sandwich tastes as if some dropped it at a truck stop. Could be worse I suppose, that time Sara confused the urine with the baby food was funny.
I only buy imported sludge none of that common stuff for me.
Moet&Chandon Champagne, Beluga caviar, Wolfsberg sludge.