Retained Fuel: A Lurking Revenue Killer

By OPW | Sep 16, 2019

Gasoline, and fuel as a whole, is a valuable commodity. It keeps many of the world’s infrastructures up and running, from commuters in personal vehicles and buses to utilities crews crisscrossing town. Because of its value to our society, those buying and selling fuel want to make sure they are getting the most they can out of it. You’ve seen it all the time; customers shake the last drips from the nozzle, and retailers want every drop from a tank trailer in its proper underground storage tank.

It seems like a simple thing to expect, but dispensing the full amount of fuel from each tank trailer compartment can become difficult based on a number of complications. For example, a trailer that loses air pressure and causes a valve to shut prematurely, or a station’s unloading area being unlevel, can incorrectly signal to a driver that the unloading process is done. A little extra product left behind can trigger disputed deliveries, which happens in one out of every 4,000 deliveries. Retained fuel can also linger until the next terminal loading, causing crossover of incompatible gas octanes or even a diesel and gasoline mix.

Because fuel shortages hurt driver-station relationships, and because mixed fuel can cause time-consuming clean-ups and compromise customer vehicles, a little leftover product is a big deal. Fuel retain may also lead to an overfill condition, which is a dangerous fire hazard and a costly waste of fuel.

Current fixes for these issues are hardly sufficient. A bucket test, where a driver manually checks for fuel left in hoses, cannot ensure an empty tank, and retain probes are effective but narrowly adopted, with only 20% of trailers in United States utilizing them. To give delivery drivers a hand, and keep the fuel supply chain running more confidently, Civacon introduced the CivaCommand Smart Tank System, a single interface that gives drivers digital tools to prevent and monitor retain, crossover and overfill.

Delivering What’s Next in Error Elimination

Civacon understands the needs of every party affected by the fuel delivery supply chain. This attention to detail serves retail stations, their customers and the drivers that service these stations. If an error is caught in time, disputes are still inconvenient for all involved, and if an error is unnoticed, damaged vehicles and ruined reputations are a distinct possibility.

Get the full story on Civacon’s total tank trailer solution, CivaCommand, and stay on top of the latest products and industry news from Civacon at civacon.com, or on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

 

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