How Jet Fuel Gets to the Airport
Nov 1st, 2007 by Alex
Every once in a while I’ll stumble upon something that I want to know more about. It could be the most remote thing that has absolutely nothing to do with what I’m doing or what I’m usually interested in. Then I have to stop what I’m doing and figure it out. It is akin to going off on a tangent while telling a story and not being able to get back on track until you finish talking about the tangential bit.
Today I had one of those moments. After dropping friends off at BWI I was coming around the bend and saw several large fuel tanks. One label read:
840,000 GAL JET-A
There were several of those, then a few of these.
1,480,000 GAL JET-A
Now that is a whole hell of a lot of jet fuel. My mind wandered a little bit on the way down the road and I found myself wondering how they get the jet fuel there. Millions of gallons of fuel. I understand how much a gallon is (the size of milk jug) or 60 gallons (the size of my water heater), but these numbers presented a problem of scale that I couldn’t work out without some numbers or frame of reference with which to compare.
Consider that a typical tank truck (such that would fill a gas station up or that you see refueling a small plane) carries a maximum of 9,000 gallons. It would take 94 trucks to fill an 840,000 gallon tank.
Railroad cars (called “tank cars”) can hold more. A typical tank car can carry carry 23,000 gallons (37 cars needed), the largest even carrying 64,000 gallons (14 cars needed). And there’s no rail system near BWI unless you count the Light Rail, and I don’t think its the correct gauge for standard locomotives.
So how do they transport jet fuel to the airport?
BWI handles over 700 flights every day. They are constantly refueling the aircraft. Some intercontinental planes have a fuel capacity of over 60,000 gallons. There’s no port super close to BWI like in New York and no rails capable of handling that much weight. If it were by truck you’d think you’d see tank trucks out on the road all of the time. Then it occurred to me. Google. Seconds later, I have a possible answer. According the Chevron, there are fuel distribution systems in place for aviation fuel. Naturally.
The fuel may be shipped directly to an airport fuel storage facility, but usually the distribution chain includes one or more intermediate storage facilities (terminals) [...]. Several modes of transportation may be used: pipeline, ship, barge, railroad tank car, and tanker truck; but not all modes are available for every destination.
Ah ha! A pipeline.
Pipelines are best suited for transporting large volumes of fuel. Batch shipments (tenders) of a product commonly exceed 400,000 gallons (10,000 barrels). For this reason, aviation turbine fuel (jet fuel) is commonly moved by pipeline.
Why the hell didn’t I think of that?
Bolt Construction specializes in jet fuel systems and is currently contracted to provide “fabrication and installation of 2500 feet of 20” jet fuel transmission pipeline” at BWI. 20″ diameter pipe. That’s huge! I guess it’d have to be. According to the Maryland Aviation Administration, “BWI tenants use over 850,000 gallons of fuel per day.” If that’s the case they only keep a few days worth of jet fuel on-site, at least that I could see.
Jet fuel might come into the Baltimore harbor on oil tankers and be shipped via pipeline to the airport. When I think pipelines I think Alaska, so from BWI to the harbor doesn’t seem like it would be that difficult. “A [middleweight] tanker is designed to load 2 million barrels of crude oil.” Now if a barrel’s capacity is 42 US gallons than the tanker would be capable of hauling 84,000,000 gallons of crude oil in one trip. More likely it comes in as crude oil and is then refined into jet fuel regionally or locally. I don’t know how much crude oil is required to produce a gallon of JET-A. That’s for another day, perhaps.
Update: Colonial Pipeline Company provides the pipeline to BWI from — just as Don mentioned in his comment — New Jersey. The complete system map is available; it takes 18.5 days to ship the product from Texas to the New York harbor.
The source doesn’t even have to be especially close to the airport. The pipeline for Kennedy Airport in New York City originates from the refinery in New Jersey, about 30 miles and two rivers away.
BWI gets its fuel from a pipeline from NJ