This month's AOPA Germany magazine features an article about a new refinery in Poland producing AVGAS 100LL and several unleaded variants at a supposedly very competitive price, planning to take market share from Total, BP and Shell.
The company is called Warter Aviation and has been around since 1972 but only recently started to focus on light aviation fuels. The European yearly production is about 120 000 tons (150 million liters) and Warter plan to increase their production from currently 20 000 tons to 40 000 tons.
Apparently they deliver throughout Europe. This could bring the long needed competition to the AVGAS market. I've asked our airfield which sources directly to ask them for a quote.
That is very good news :)
I never for a moment believed that avgas is a burden for the refiners.
150M litres makes it a ~ €100M business, based on a plausible estimate of the trade price. A few years ago I was paying €0.60/litre for avgas in Croatia, duty and VAT free (don't ask me how; I wasn't complaining).
€100M is a very nice business to have. I am sure the margins are pretty good too; you are not negotiating with the likes of Ryanair.
That sounds good. I think the prices there are competitive already. Last time I fuelled in Poland was in November in Gdansk and I paid ca 1,6 € pr litre.
The "normal" price is higher but if you are registered as a commercial entity as I understand they are waiving some fees. Anyway you get the fuel cheaper.
Are there any Polish pilots on this board? I'm going to stay in10 months in Poland starting summer 2013 so it would be fun to get in contact with some.
Hi,
I'm from Wroclaw. If you have any question, here is my mail [email protected] or you can contact me on facebook
Best wishes, Michal Romanowski TB 10
Cool. I will be living in Konin from August 1st. I'll e-mail you my contact info.
I just talked to the sales rep of Warter for Germany.
They offer Avgas at 0.95€/l + transport which is around 0.04-0.05€/l for Southern Germany (i.e. far from Poland). So the price per liter without mineral oil taxes and VAT is about 1€/l. The price does not depend on the quantity but the transport price does.
That makes it significantly cheaper than the competition. In Germany the mineral oil tax on Avgas is 0.72€/l and on top of it we have 19%VAT so without any margin for the fuel station, the Warter Avgas can be offered for 2.05€/l.
Apparently they have 40 airfields in Germany now within 5 months after entering the market. One airfield he mentions sells the Avgas with a margin of 0.10€.
This means that Warter does have a significant impact on the Avgas market. Their price is at least 15% below the competition (if you want to use this word for the existing oligopoly). Good stuff.
That is good news indeed, for a fair part of our contributors. Apparently, some keen eye in the right place saw the niche in the market. But will it achieve more than pushing back the end of AvGas? By how many years?
I think the €100M-200M market is big enough for a player like this to be very interested.
The best business to be in is one which everybody else thinks is dead and buried 
You have the benefits of steady demand, low stress, low blood pressure, without the fly by night competitors funded by eager fly by night financiers who plague just about every exciting and "leading edge" business/technology activity, depress prices, drive everybody crazy, and go bust soon afterwards.
One of the very few "small" companies who I knew when I started in 1978 and which is still going is making, guess what, EEPROM programmers
My own business is in, guess what, RS232 RS422 RS485 ... all officially dead c. 1970.
