The TSL market in Poland also includes secondary logistics of road transport of liquid fuels. Road transport of fuels in tankers, although not the dominant share in total road transport, deserves closer attention due to the characteristics of the transported product in terms of the safety level regarding the quantity and quality of the transported and distributed product.
Road transport of hazardous materials, conditioned primarily by the ADR agreement, appropriate transport permits, and licenses, allows for its safe execution. The leading subject in terms of the described safety level is the road transport of liquid fuels (diesel oil according to PN EN 590 and unleaded petrol PN EN 228 as the main assortment) in tankers. The purpose of this article is to attempt to show the conditions, premises, and trends that define and shape the service market in this sector.
Secondary logistics of liquid fuels is primarily road transport using road tankers (up to max. 40 GVW) and tanker trucks. In the simplest terms, the secondary logistics chain of liquid fuels consists of links comprising refineries/loading terminals, own transport or transport companies as outsourcing of transport services, and the recipient/customer. The weakest link, which affects the safety level in terms of quality and quantity, is the road transport in tankers/tanker trucks itself. In the article, conditions regarding non-culpable natural losses have been intentionally omitted, as these are regulated by separate regulations.
The subject of research into these conditions is road transport, which carries out the transport of liquid fuels in the previously mentioned system, to recipients from various sectors. Products are delivered to stations of individual corporations, private stations, supermarket petrol stations (for example, stations located at Auchan or Tesco), wholesale and individual recipients who are not petrol stations but have underground and above-ground product tanks (Figure 1). The most significant conditions – factors influencing the safety of the quality and quantity of the transported product – are:
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diversity of transport means used,
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loading method: tankers with bottom loading (so-called hermetic), with top loading,
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unloading method: tankers with gravity unloading, with a pump system, with a measuring system,
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structure of the transported cargo share,
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human factor – the level of personnel training, in particular drivers and their awareness of risks and the impact of their own correct work on the level of safety achieved for the products they transport,
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procedures as an important tool connecting all links participating in the described liquid fuel transport logistics chain.
The factor defined as the structure of the transported cargo means in this case the type of products loaded during loading. Mentioning the transport of liquid fuels earlier, loading/unloading was treated as the ratio of the number of types of product loaded during one filling (Figure 2). For example, during one loading, a multi-compartment tanker can be filled with:
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only one product (for example, only diesel oil or only unleaded petrol),
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many products from the same group (diesel oil and enriched oils, for example, ON Dynamic, Diesel Extra, ON Ultimate),
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many products from different groups (oil/enriched oils and unleaded petrol/enriched unleaded petrol).
The data contained in Figure 2 show the structure in the loading system as the sum of all loadings (diesel oils with petrols) in individual months in relation to the sum of loadings with only one product (in this study, loadings with diesel oil were taken into account). The results concern loadings for one surveyed recipient who used the entire network of fuel terminals in Poland during the entire year 2010. It was intentional to show data where the loading structure is the same (the sum of all products loaded simultaneously in correlation to loadings with only diesel oil), with the difference that one independent terminal was studied, from which loadings were carried out by all recipients (transport serving corporate stations, associated stations, supermarket stations, wholesale and individual recipients with their own transport).
Analyzing these results, it is easy to notice that the study of the first criterion is the ratio of the shares of diesel oil loadings to loadings with at least two different products; it is a system of 49% A1 to 51% B1, remembering to exclude the range for the item “January”/”average” – these values constitute the result of 31%” to 69%” respectively. The differences easily noticeable for the two studied criteria allow for the thesis that loadings with a larger number of different types of loaded products create a greater probability of reducing the quality safety level of the transported product.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 2/2011.