Fuel Prices and Fuel Theft

Fuel Prices and Fuel Theft

World Petroleum Reserves

Nowadays petroleum, the black pearl, is the most important resource which is consumed and increased in value. Increasing of Oil prices effects the fuel prices, and fuel prices are increasing day by day all arround the world. This countinous increase on fuel prices effects logistics industry, more than private car owners. As it is widely known, fuel is the main expense point of logistics companies and the fuel prices, which is inreasing day by day, make it really hard to taking action for those companies. On the other hand, as a result of increasing oil prices, logistics companies try to have savings from other points such as personnel expenses or maintanence expenses which results in short term. But it causes bigger problems in midterm and longterm. As a result of this action, companies hire unexperienced or non-qualified drivers and it causes high fuel consumption and maintenence expenses.

Crude Oil, Gasoline and Diesel Prices by Year

On the other hand, logistics companies try to maximize their effience by using GPS tracking systems to track their vehicles on real time, optimising their routes and using Can Bus monitoring systems to see and record their actual, daily and total fuel consumptions. But besides these, there are some threats from internal and external envoriment to their fuel stocks, which is one of the most important assest of a truck. For example, if we are talking about a truck, which may have fuel stock up to 1.000liters, which costs nearly 1.800 - 2.100 USD. This amount put trucks on the focus of fuel thieves to steal fuel on truck.

We can categorise fuel theft in two classes.

1. Fuel Theft Attempt From External Environment:

Attacks of this kind of attempts usually come up as a petty larceny. Those kind of attacks usally occur by removing fuel tank cap at night, when truck is parked and tranferring all fuel inside the tank by a transfer pump. This petty larceny is not a sustainable case, it starts and finishes in a few minutes and your total lost becomes all fuel inside your tank.

2. Fuel Theft Attempt From Internal Environment:

Attacks of this kind of attempts are shrewd attempts, which planned and organised by people who is in touch with the truck as an employee/driver. It is time oriented, and proceed slowly. It is spreaded over time, by transferring little volumes from fuel tank. As a result of that truck or fleet owner can not realise that something is going wrong because of their relationship or trust with the thief. But it is dangerous than fuel theft attempts from external environment. Because it is spreaded over time, it can not be seen how much fuel is stolen, or how long the thief is stealing fuel from truck. To prevent this, Armoli has developed Kaan Elite Can Anti Fuel Theft System to check your fuel on tank twice by CanBus module tracking and fuel cap tracking.

As a summary, we can say that logistics companies should be very carreful to prevent fuel theft. The importan theft attempts are coming from internal environment which can not be realised easily.