Australian Convenience Store News | Continuous Leaks Detection

Leaks of any kind can cause a great deal of embarrassment both personally and professionally, but in some situations there's a great deal more than embarrassment at stake. Here are the latest innovations in continuous leak detection

Mopping up after a spill is not a job anyone in the oil industry wants to think about. It's dirty, bad for business, expensive, damages your relationship with the community and can even mean a trip to court, none of which are on anyone's wish list.

Making sure it doesn't happen is not cheap, but is there an alternative? Not really. No-one who wants to stay in business can afford not to look at continuous leak detection and secondary containment.

While there currently is no legislation governing the situation, various state governments are looking at it. In the meantime, the industry's Code Of Practice (CP4) requires new sites to comply with a series of guidelines on secondary containment and monitoring which aim to protect the environment from pollution - and the owner/operator from legal action.

Existing sites, however, can maintain the status quo but the experts suggest they cannot afford to sit back and ignore the potential problem.

"It's called risking your future," says Steve Connell, regional petroleum products manager with the STP Group, which supplies single-wall and secondary contained fibreglass and jacketed tanks, pipes and accessories to the industry.

"As a bare minimum you should use a good monitoring system, particularly if you don't have tanks and pipes with secondary containment. No-one can afford the gamble. If something is happening underground you need to know about it quickly so you can nip it in the bud."

Mr Connell says any operator who is planning their future around their business should think long-term and therefore, secondary containment. He points out that finance is easier to raise because banks are twitchy about the possibility of legal action.

"It's better to pay the extra now and avoid digging everything up to start all over again in 10 years' time. Install a good monitoring system at the same time because it's easier to sustain your profits, when there's minimal risk of leakage and you can account for every drop of your stock."

According to Reed Leighton, director of Leighton O'Brien Mass Tech (LOB) which supplies Statistical Inventory Reconciliation systems to the industry, there are five ways of keeping an eye on potential pollution problems.

"There are automatic tank gauges, SIR systems such as ours, monitoring wells, installing new tanks with full secondary containment built in, and periodic testing. While some are better than others, I doubt that anyone would argue against the fact that every outlet needs a monitoring system.

"Pollution and the threat of legal action is one side of the argument, but with the margins that exist in the industry today, there's a very fine line between making a profit and not making one.

"No matter how good the system, there will always be some form of fuel loss - the smart operator aims to minimise that."

Mr Leighton describes SIR systems as an automated form of wet stock control, an independent, third-party assessment of what's delivered, what's sold and any discrepancy between those figures. LOB can also deliver an analysis of any losses and recommend ways of tackling them.

LOB now has available the latest technology from the US, a membrane-based vapor recovery system called 'Permeator' which claims to reduce evaporative losses by more than 95 per cent. The system reduces inventory shrinkage as suffered by the dealer, and prevents harmful contaminants escaping into the atmosphere.

Permeator has been tested very successfully in both Europe and the US and at time of writing was undergoing final assessment by Australian authorities for readiness for market in August.

"Some losses are within the operator's control," says Mr Leighton. "So if you have a system which monitors tanks and reduces evaporative losses, nirvana is possible!"

VR Australia (formerly Veeder Root) has a number of state-of-the-art continuous leak detection systems now on the market including the TLS350 and TLSNT.

These 'real-time' leak detection systems can monitor up to 16 tanks 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year to 0.38 litres per hour.

"They check the height of the product, the height of the water and in-tank temperatures and uses statistical analysis of the data to tell you what's going on underground," says Russell Dupuy, VR Australia's technical director.

"It's a fully automated premium system which doesn't just monitor losses. It does all the other wet stock management processes too."

VR Australia does have less sophisticated - read, cheaper - systems, starting from the basic entry level 'dumb' tank gauge which eliminates the need to physically dip tanks with the associated health and safety risks.

"Everyone in the industry is so much more aware these days," Mr Dupuy says.

"It's not just the environmental concerns, although they're obviously paramount. But monitoring stock is all about enhancing profit levels, avoiding litigation and avoiding the time and cost involved in a clean-up."

"Eighty per cent of the market is now buying secondary containment packages," says STP's Steve Connell, "but no-one, even with secondary containment, can afford to ignore the basic commonsense of monitoring and doing it at a reasonably technical level.

"Monitoring will be regulated in the years ahead, so it's false economy and short-term planning to think you can do without it. Do it properly."