Originally Posted By: Tdbo
If driver Joe Sixpack is out on his daily excursion and his last stop of the day is the Shell station, and he does not have enough product with the TT blessed additive in it, but he has an adequate supply of fuel spec'd to Marathon on his tanker, how is that not going to go in the Shell tank? Joe wants to go home and the jobber is not going to assume the extra cost of another trip to the terminal when it can be avoided.
A tanker has individual bulkhead tanks. It is not just one long tank of fuel, it is a row of individual tanks all connected together as a single tanker trailer. Joe doesn't just make a route and drop fuel out of the same 6000 gallons he has on board. While he may make multiple stops, the station he is dropping fuel at get the entire bulkhead tank that he has the hoses draining from. So he could have TT in one or more bulkheads, and non TT in the others. Tankers are not just floating around dropping fuel. They pick up the fuel at the terminal that the station has ordered, and while it is loaded on the tanker, whatever additives that are required for that station are injected in the stream of fuel. So one station may not want TT, so the bulkheads for them are loaded with non TT. While the other stop off does want TT, and TT is loaded into those bulkheads. I suppose that Joe might be having a bad day and drop the wrong bulkhead load of fuel at a station, but he sure isn't running around looking to just drop fuel at any location so he can go home. Everything is scheduled and fuel is loaded per that schedule and customer.
I get the feeling some think tankers just run around and make drops at stations on a routine schedule similar to the garbage folks on a schedule doing dumpsters and it doesn't matter if the dumpster is full or not. Tankers drop fuel and type that the station has ordered.
