There is much said on the overlanding FB pages about vehicle fuel in Bolivia . After eight weeks of trial and error around the country, here’s our ‘potted intelligence’ on what we found.

The first thing which affects non-Bolivian registered vehicles is price and availability of fuel. Then for diesel engines, there is the added excitement of poor quality fuel which waxes in cold temperatures at high altitudes. Finally, for modern diesel engines, there is the ‘pièce de résistance’: high sulphur diesel which can clagg-up (I think that’s a technical term 🙂 ) the vehicle’s diesel particulate filter (DPF).

Pricing of fuel in Bolivia

Fuel at the pump for Bolivian registered vehicles is subsidised heavily by El Presidente. Old Evo doesn’t intend foreigners to benefit from this subsidy and we foreigners should therefore pay full ‘Gringo Rate’ of 8.88 Bolivianos per litre. Locals pay less than half of this. From the FB discussions, we see there has been some heated debate amongst overlanders as to whether it’s right that foreigners should pay more than locals at the pump for fuel in Bolivia. But in the spirit of peace and reconciliation amongst fellow travellers, let’s just acknowledge that rightly or wrongly, the system exists.

Availability of fuel in Bolivia

We started our Bolivian adventure on the premise of being prepared to pay the full Gringo Rate for fuel (probably because we were a bit ‘chicken’ about potentially breaking the law in a new country and even at this rate, it’s still cheaper than we would pay in UK!). However, we soon realised that fuel in Bolivia is not as simple as merely turning-up at any old fuel station and asking for a quick top-up. No Señor. After some trial and error, we worked out that only one chain of fuel stations – the government owned ‘YPFB’ – is authorised to sell fuel to us. Some of the other non-YPFB stations may be persuaded to sell to foreigners if:

a)   you walk onto the forecourt and fill empty jerry-cans. The fuel is then technically not going into a foreign vehicle. All a bit of a nonsense really… in many cases your vehicle doesn’t even need to be out of view of the pump-chap; or

b)   you ask the pump-chap to be a bit of a devil, break the rules and negotiate a price for fuel pumped into the vehicle tank ‘sin factura’ (without receipt).

In both of these cases, the negotiated rate will be somewhere between the Gringo Rate and the local subsidised rate. If the pump-chap agrees to this, he/she tells the computer that it is a ‘local sale’ (by entering a spurious Bolivian registration number), then pockets the difference between the local price and the negotiated price. For obvious reasons, many pump-chaps decline this offer of illegal reward and you’re then forced to look for a more complicit pump-chap (who may, if you’re lucky, be at another fuel station nearby).

So given that we are good little law-abiding travellers, prepared to pay the full Gringo Rate, we looked-around to find the YPFB fuel stations. There seemed to be plenty of them around so no problem, right? Well… not quite. We soon worked out that not all YPFB fuel stations are officially permitted to sell to foreigners. It seems that there are two types of YPFB stations in Bolivia:

• stations which have the YPFB brand logo sitting alongside a local tradename. These stations seem to have a franchise arrangement to sell YPFB fuel, but not to foreigners. For our purposes, this effectively puts them in the category of the non-YPFB station; or
• fully branded YPFB stations, with no additional local name on the signs. These seem to be the only fuel stations officially permitted to sell fuel to foreigners, with a ‘factura’ (invoice) and at the full Gringo Rate. We have heard from other travellers that even these ‘fully branded’ YPFB stations might refuse to sell to you when they can’t be bothered with the admin, but we never had this problem and they always sold fuel to us when we found them

These ‘fully branded’ YPFB stations don’t make themselves easy to find and (according to the Law of Murphy) they’re not often around when you’re looking for a re-fill (although there is at least one somewhere in each major town). In our truck Cuthbert we can carry fuel for a range of up to 2,500km, so we have some capacity to hunt around. Smaller vehicles with less fuel capacity can have problems finding any fuel station that will sell to them, particularly on the remote cross-country routes.

So… the up-shot is… although we were prepared to pay the full Gringo Rate, we sometimes couldn’t find any authorised YPFB fuel stations to buy from and we found ourselves forced into ‘Bonnie & Clyde’ law-breaking!  We had no choice but to enter into (illicit 🙂 !! ) negotiations with either the non-YPFB fuel stations or the YPFB-franchise stations. We had varying degrees of success with this: sometimes the pump-chaps were eager and willing to give us a good price and make a few bucks on the side; sometimes they took some persuading and we had to speak to the station boss-chap; sometimes they refused point-blank “No posible Señor”.

So we had a few inconveniences occasionally in finding a place to fuel-up, but in eight weeks driving around Bolivia, we never once found ourselves stranded without fuel. If one turned us down, we always found a more willing pump-chap within our existing fuel range. (Note: we should say again here, this is partly due to our reasonably large fuel carrying capacity and 2,500km driving range. We always tried to fill-up well before reaching a mission-critical stage. Vehicles with smaller tanks would need to plan more carefully and maybe carry more jerry-cans, particularly when heading to remote areas).

The High-Sulphur Diesel Saga

So unless you’ve got a ‘big rig’ with a tank so huge as to take you right through your Bolivian adventure without refuelling, the above will probably apply to you. If you have a diesel engine and you’re exploring the altiplano, you may have the additional excitement of dealing with fuel waxing-up in cold temperatures/high altitude.

We found that the quality of fuel in Bolivia, even when bought in the high altitude towns, isn’t prepared for these conditions. Initially we were (foolishly) blasé about this as our fancy-pants truck Cuthbert has fuel-heaters built into the filters. Or so we thought…! Just when we were parked up at around 4,000m overnight, Marcus discovered that our (alleged) fuel filter warmers didn’t automatically come on! Click here to see how he dealt with this. Another popular tactic is to park with your fuel tank facing east where it will get the earliest sun of the day to melt the waxing.

If, like us, you are taking the sacred (and to many, unforgiveable) risk of travelling altiplano Bolivia in a new-ish jalopy with one of those modern new-fangled diesel engine things, then the high sulphur fuel could block your DPF and potentially lead to a more eventful journey than you anticipated. Techie-gurus can click here to see how Marcus dealt with this for Cuthbert in Bolivia. For those like me, with a brain somewhat smaller than a planet, the conclusion can be summarised that diesel bought from non-YPFB fuel stations caused Cuthbert’s DPF to clagg-up at high altitude; whereas diesel from YPFB fuel stations (regardless of which of the two types of YPFB fuel station; the YPFB brand of diesel seems to be higher quality/lower sulphur than diesel from other fuel stations) caused fewer problems for the DPF at altitude.

So there you go… our potted intelligence on fuel in Bolivia. Not the easiest of scenarios, but all part of the overlanding fun!

Click here for the main home page, or link to South America home page.

Hey… was this useful? If so, you might like to support our website costs with a donation below. Thanks 😊👍