Unlawful Marketing of Red Diesel

A widely known dyed fuel used for various operations such as heating and construction, and for seldom used automobiles such as farm tractors and road scrapers, red diesel is sold for the aforementioned consumption purposes at a much lower price than regular diesel. The main reason why red diesel is sold at a lower price is because governments who employ this type of fuel do not apply tax regulations on it.

From the name itself, red diesel exemplifies a red color as a result of the dye solution added to the fuel. Fuel dyeing is a common practice nowadays to allow government authorities to easily pinpoint which fuel is tax regulated and which one is not. Since red diesel is not tax regulated, purchase of it for a cheap price causes certain groups to re-fabricate it and sell it to the public at the same price with regular diesel.

These groups reprocess red diesel with the aim of removing the red dye to make it look like the clear, commercially-available diesel. Thus, legal manufacturers has deployed an intelligent way of detecting red diesel by combining an invisible chemical tracer in the red diesel so that proper authorities will still be able to detect red diesel even when the dye has been washed away. In this way, government authorities are still able to apprehend these illegal groups even when they have washed the dye away by detecting the chemical tracer, which is usually done through roadside checkpoints and vehicular spot-checks.