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Excerpt from Cootes chapter

Escaping the Rat Race

 

In due course, I inherited a run and truck of my own from John Warner, who had succeeded Mike McEvoy as Area Manager. The truck was the T900 Kenworth I’d originally been engaged to drive. It was a pre-production prototype, built in 1991: CAT 3406-425, 15sp Roadranger and gear-bound to 90km/h for 90t GCW road train operations. The run went west from Adelaide on Mondays and Wednesdays, taking me to Port Wakefield, the York Peninsula, Port Pirie, Port Augusta and Whyalla, loading at Port Bonython Refinery then back to Adelaide. On Fridays the run was the same as far as Port Bonython, where I loaded in the afternoon but then went down the Eyre Peninsula to Port Lincoln (and places in between) overnight. I was back at the refinery to reload at 7am, returning to Adelaide Saturday arvo if I wasn’t diverted elsewhere.

 

Needless to say, some creative logbook accounting was involved, usually achieved by not filling in the ‘overnight’ details. That was particularly important when I got diverted – which happened regularly – to Renmark to put a full load into the Elgas depot. I don’t know what was going on up there, but they seemed to regularly ‘run out’ or ‘run too low’ on Saturdays, despite having 100t (197,800L) storage. Bonython to Renmark return is, at best, a 13 hour trip (10.5 hours driving, plus 2.5 hours to unload 20t of gas). On these occasions I would reload Saturday evening for my Monday run, returning to Adelaide midday Sunday.

 

The country run suited me just fine. I was out of the city and those few people I encountered were down-to-earth country types. Down the Eyre Peninsula was all afterhours, with hardly any traffic, and deserted apart from the Port Lincoln Mobil servo late-shift staff (if I got there before midnight closing).

 

Interspersed with my regular delivery schedule were random loads to CIG Alice Springs and CIG Perth, and along with a couple of our other tankers, over a three week period I did a number of loads for Elgas from Dandenong, Victoria to Adelaide.

The domestic gas supply system struck me as unusual. Presumably the product was owned by the well owner: in South Australia’s case, SANTOS (South Australia and Northern Territory Oil Search). The distributors – Elgas, Shell, BP, and so on – were required to submit their bulk orders yearly, for twelve months in advance. If they failed to use their allocation they still had to pay for their full quota – a pretty sweet set-up for the well owners! If distributors wanted an extension to their quota, the price took a substantial jump.

 

In the case of the Dandenong loading, Elgas had possibly near exhausted their annual SA quota, resorting to filling the shortfall from Melbourne. Apparently, trucking the product twice the distance (770km v 400km) was cheaper than paying the penalty rate! In another instance our SA trucks spent a month transferring product from Port Bonython to storage in Brisbane on behalf of Mobil. Was it really more economically viable to truck approximately 600,000L nearly 2,000km?

 

I was fascinated by gas pricing and fuel pricing in general. A Shell Rep told me that pricing in SA was basically done by putting a pin in the map, centred on Adelaide. Circles radiating out from that central point delineated increasing price zones. I imagine a similar system was used in every State.

 

We were loading the product at Port Bonython at 12.5 cents per litre (cpl). We would then transport it 400km to the Adelaide metro where it would fetch a service station pump price of 18-25cpl depending on the day of the week. Whyalla town centre was one of my regular drops, 30km by road (18km as the crow flies) from the refinery. Pump price in Whyalla was usually 38-45cpl, and the same in Port Augusta despite the Port being 90km closer, by road, to Adelaide.  (I was told the refinery was loading the same product onto ships for export at 3.5cpl.)

 

Loading rail tankers at Whyalla usually involved doing two tankers consecutively, but on one occasion I did three. Each rail tanker has a 50t (89,250L) payload. Our road tankers were 20t payload (35,700L). That’s two-and-a-half road tanker loads per rail tanker. Each road tanker takes thirty minutes to load at the Port Bonython Refinery. There’s a twenty-minute drive from the refinery to the rail yard, two and a half hours to transfer to rail, twenty minutes to get back to the refinery. In round figures, a four-hour round trip. To fill two rail tankers requires five round trips, or twenty hours, ex refinery. Three rail tankers need eight round trips – thirty-two hours. Certainly, I didn’t have to do continuous twenty hour days, but I got to read a lot of books while loading and unloading! The T900 had come equipped with a TV but it never worked in the time I was driving it.

 

The difference in loading and unloading times is down to the tanker plumbing. All the tankers had  2.5in (6.35cm) bulk loading connections and the refinery pump’s flow rate was around 1300L/min. Cootes tankers were discharged by PTO/hydraulic pumps. Some of the tankers had 2.5in (6cm) bulk discharge connections and the truck pumps would deliver around 500L/min. My tanker only had a 1.25in (3cm) output through a 25m hose reel, delivering about 240L/min.

 

 

End of Cootes Excerpt