hawg_farmer

Do the copilots drive? Do they get the same training?

Former pipeline employee here. Sometimes it's just supply and demand. Our pipelines ran "consecutive batches" no spheres or "pigs" to divide between batches of fuel. Diesel might follow gasoline, jet fuel might follow diesel. There is a process to "cut the batch" at the appropriate time. If it's an "allocation state" ( so many barrels of xxx xxx product per day/week/month) it might be cheaper to keep the line running than shut down and wait on xXxX product. They didn't make money sitting on fuel in the line. Think of a pipeline like a ginormous spider web underground, we're connected with Aaaaaa and they're connected to Bbbbbb who's connected to Cccccc and we are Ddddddd, but we need to move our products to let Eeeeee bring their products out of the refineries. Also playing into this is the U.S. EPA has zones that certain fuels are allowed into at certain times of the year. Sometimes it's basically a "clearance sale" so we can "turn a tank" to get the correct RVP for that zone.
Don't shoot me, we have to buy all of our fuel too.

Lab work was done on our lines at every "set off point" which was followed up with redundant testing at our bigazz corporate lab. And yes, we had a few newbies miss the results and ended up recalling thousands upon thousands of gallons of fuel then went to retrieve that product out of gas station tanks. That was like 1 overnight loading of fuel. We replaced that fuel with known good fuel, paid the "demurrage" ( paid them for whatever losses they had) and usually I didn't see that Terminal Operator again....

Has your community always been at your present location? Or did some members come from smaller intentional interests?

Thank you for answering. Our family is from that region and about 40 years (geez I hated typing that!) there was a planned community on a farm very close to ours. It kinda just faded away as they aged. My family enjoyed them a lot.