A Full Guide to Gas Station Tank Calibration

A Full Guide to Tank Calibration (Gas Station Tanks, Especially)

 Tank Calibration like the calibration of other equipment in a gas station, refinery, or petrochemical industry is important to have correct information on the inventory or stock. Without such correct and accurate information, different short and long-term issues can arise such as:

1. Shortages in fuel delivery by tankers to the gas stations are not identified to be the real shortage in delivery or the problem in the tank gauging system. This issue leads to lots of claims and court cases between station owners/operators and the Fuel Retail Companies.
2. Not being able to determine the correct inventory amount in the gas station or other tanks, while ordering a standard amount of fuel can lead in some cases to overflow of fuel from tanks which is very dangerous and against HSE and environmental rules
3. In some critical industries having the accurate level-volume or stage-volume, or strapping table of the tank has a meaningful effect on the whole chemical process that the tank is a part of. For industries that mass balance, ullage, pressure, and such information are important for their process control.
4. Tank calibration can have direct and indirect environmental impacts as well:
1. There are cases that a station due to tank gauging issues has to do the tank calibration, in such cases if the wet method or even laser tape method is going to be used it is 100% against environmental rules since tanks must be washed, cleaned, de-gasified, and in laser-tape method, a person must go inside the tank which is against HSE policies in most cases. With the wet method, even if fuel is used instead of water the process is extremely lengthy without sale during it and the results are not dependable because it depends on the job's method.
2. Tank calibration if not done, and there would be shortages in the system, these shortages can not be identified for what reasons, if it is from leakage in the system then fuel leakage that normally happens downward will lead to soil and groundwater contamination.
5. Tank calibration has different methods and the ISO also addresses it in different ways as follows:

• ISO 7507-2:2022; Petroleum and liquid petroleum products — Calibration of vertical cylindrical tanks. Part 2: Optical-reference-line method or electro-optical distance-ranging method, which refers to 3D laser scanning technology.
• Wet method of tank calibration by liquid and incremental method which is addressed here: https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/en/#iso:std:iso:4269:ed-1:v1:en 
• Shell Global also has admitted 3D laser scanning technology for gas station tanks

I will explain the whole Methods of Tank Calibration in another post later and for now, we consider it enough to talk about the necessity of tank calibration for the industries that have tanks. 

It is important the dear customers consider this important point that at the moment the only and best technology that can tackle the tank calibration safely, complying with all HSE polices is the 3D laser scanning method. DOVER FS is presenting one the best technologies in this regard, which is called 3DLS.

Ref: https://www.doverfuelingsolutions.com/products/tank-gauging/3d-laser-scan