It is a huge fuel depot, spanning thousands of hectares in Ho Chi Minh City’s outer district of Thu Duc, where gasoline mixing is conducted on a daily basis behind four concrete brick walls and under the close watch of fake-fuel producers. Its name is impressive as well -- Crazy Buffalo, or Trau Dien in Vietnamese. On June 9 Tuoi Tre correspondents spotted a tanker truck entering the depot and heading towards the mixing area, where a group of young men immediately appeared and extracted some 3,000 liters of A92 gasoline from the vehicle. The men then refilled the tank with an unknown white liquid they said was bought from dubious sources to recoup for the extracted amount of authentic petroleum. The mixed gasoline would be transferred to filling stations in District 9 and the neighboring province of Binh Duong for consumption, some of the employees revealed.

A number of tanker trucks arrive in Trau Dien depot (Tuoi Tre)

At Crazy Buffalo depot, there is yet another trick to produce bogus petroleum -- using dye chemicals to turn A83 gasoline into A92. The formula is simple: mix yellow A83 with A92 gasoline, and add a little green dye to turn the whole mixture green like normal A92, an illegal gasoline mixer told Tuoi Tre. “There are cases when we only need to put one bucket of green-dyed A83 gasoline into a tank to make all of the liquid in the tank green, which means A83 gasoline has become [fake] A92,” said the man, who wished not to be named. He added that the mock fuel will be distributed to the southern provinces of Tay Ninh, Kien Giang, and An Giang provinces, and even the Central Highlands province of Dak Lak.Huge amount produced The Trau Dien mixing facility is led by Nguyen Thanh Tung, 35, who has 15 years of experience in mixing substandard gasoline. “A 12,000-liter tanker truck will have 2,000 liters of fuel extracted whenever it enters Crazy Buffalo. And the figure for the 16,000-liter truck is 4,000 liters,” said Tung, adding that the green dye is in fact the same chemical used to dye fabrics.

Tung revealed that they also mix fake A92 gasoline with a substance imported from China to increase the fuel’s octane rate. “However, the substance can also severely corrode metals, and thus usually destroys the fuel tank of the vehicles,” he added. “The corroded tank will leak gasoline and cause the vehicles to burn in case of high temperature.” There are some 50 people who work inside the Crazy Buffalo depot, where the fuel mixing section is highly protected.Made-from-water fuel oil The employees at Crazy Buffalo can even turn water into fuel oil (FO). On August 16, two tanker trucks sat parked at the mixing area, waiting to take on oil from the facility. Inside the mixing house, three young men were busy producing FO by filling a 220-liter iron cask with water.

The water was then mixed with a black, condensed oil full of sludge, and a certain amount of acid and non-fluid oil. That combination is enough for a so-called FO product. There are dozens of tank truck entering the depot to be filled with the water-made FO before transporting them to Binh Duong Province for consumption. The acid used in the mixing process is bought from unknown sources at VND100,000 per 30 liters, and so is the black oil. The facility can produce some 6,600 liter of FO from water on a daily basis.