The ever cheerful Fearne Gilson, marketing director of Manline (below left), gives the thumbs-up as one of the 18 splendid tankers with an MAN TGA 26.400 as prime mover heads off from its manufacturing base at GRW Engineering to do service for ArcelorMittal South Africa.

Every now and again we come across a transport operation or application that really stands out in terms of innovation and pure ingenuity. An invitation last November from GRW Engineering to the handover of some new tankers to Pietermaritzburg-based logistics operator Manline for use in a contract with ArcelorMittal South Africa sparked the feeling that here was one such operation. That feeling was not wrong. In fact, we came across an industry-first writes Patrick O’Leary.

I’VE BEEN HEARING some real lousy stories of late from transporters who are locked into fixed price agreements with their clients and cannot pass on the higher fuel prices they are paying for the diesel necessary to service those contracts. The customers won’t accept the increases.

My heart goes out to those transporters because it is no fault of their own that they are facing diesel price hikes. Rather, they are trying to survive a crisis that has hit the industry hard. And yet they are faced with customers who are ’gatvas’ in their determination to keep the rates as they are because it is “fixed for a year”. The transporter is expected to absorb the increased diesel costs. 

What rubbish. This is such an adversarial position to adopt. It leads to a win-lose rather than a win-win situation. When I hear stories like I’ve been hearing of late, I get extremely agitated at bombastic transport customers/shippers and that old feeling of customers being dogs rather than kings creeps into my psyche. And that reminds me - why can’t we do away with that stupid word ‘shippers’ when referring to trucking customers? Ships drive on sea; trucks drive on land. 

It’s at times like this that I cast my mind back to last November when I boarded the GRW Engineering transport bus outside Cape Town airport to go to Worcester. Already on board were a number of people I didn’t recognise and who I thought might be journalists from newly launched tanker magazines. But no, they weren’t.

The first guy I shook hands with introduced himself as Jack Sewsanker, Key Account Manager at ArcelorMittal South Africa’s Coke & Chemicals, who turned out to be a grand man with a dry and wicked sense of humor. He was accompanied by a number of his colleagues from ArcelorMittal South Africa. 

Also there was Lance Naude, regional manager of Manline’s Wadeville depot along with our host from GRW, the inimitable Jaco du Plessis who kept offering his guests a choice of ‘chicken or beef’ sandwiches. 

It was all so pleasant but what on earth were ArcelorMittal South Africa doing there? After all, the guys taking delivery of the tankers were Manline. They were the ones buying the goodies. 

Spirit of team-work 

As the day progressed, my question was answered for I saw what should be standard practice in all supplier/operator/customer relationships. I saw a spirit of teamwork where all parties were working together to ensure maximum success for all involved. In fact, all three parties had been working for some time in ensuring an ultimate win-win situation emerged. How much different to what we’re seeing today with the diesel hikes.

It all started when ArcelorMittal South Africa put out a tender for a contract involving the haulage of a range of Pitch product with varying  softening points which are used to make anodes and electrodes for melting different metals alloys. Manline put in their bid and won the tender. It was not a new activity for ArcelorMittal South Africa. However, it was certainly a new one for Manline. 

As they got closer to the operational aspects of the contract, Manline realised they would be dealing with a difficult product that needed meticulous attention to detail. Picking up a load and chucking in on the back of a truck was miles from the reality of this contract. 

I’m not a technical boffin on this but let me have a go at explaining it. Pitch is a product derived from crude tar which, in turn, is a product derived from the coke making process. No, not the type you drink or shove up your nose. The coke referred to here comes from heating coal, just like charcoal comes from heating wood. That takes place at ArcelorMittal South Africa’s Coke & Chemical plants situated at Vanderbijlpark, Newcastle and Pretoria. 

By some chemical wizardry, it is during this process that the by-product of crude tar is produced and that tar is trucked into ArcelorMittal South Africa’s Vanderbijlpark Works where it is then reprocessed and sold as pitch. Part of the transport contract involves Manline tankers bringing the crude tar in from Newcastle and Pretoria. 

Once processed into pitch, that product then gets transported to Richards Bay where it is used by BHP Billiton in the manufacture of anodes and electrodes for melting aluminium. Some of it also goes to a ferro alloys smelter in Witbank. 

Sounds cool but the problem is, there’s a lot of heat involved. Manline’s Lance Naude, who supervises the onsite operations at the Vanderbijlpark plant, explains that the different types of pitch require different temperatures to be adhered to while being transported. These temperatures vary from 160 to 220 degree C. “The specific pitch has to be delivered at a certain temperature or BHP Billiton will not offload,” he says. 

Ouch! My bet is that during the celebrations that took place at Manline’s head-office in Pietermaritzburg after winning the tender, the thought was expressed that maybe some refrigerated contract might have been a better one to go for. But guys like Manline’s MD Neil Henderson, marketing director Fearne Gilson and the rest of the crew at this dynamic company, are not ones to run from a challenge. Enter GRW Engineering. 

Something completely different

On seeing the needs of the transport operation, GRW realised that they were dealing with something completely different with this one. Constant and sustainable temperatures had to be maintained throughout the trip from Vanderbijlpark to Richards Bay and these temperatures had to be varied according to the different pitch products. 

After forfeiting a few games of golf to sit behind the drawing board, GRW’s MD Gerhard van der Merwe and his intrepid team realised they would have to call on outside expertise to advise on the heating situation. They thus contacted Eltherm, a well established European based company supplying heating solutions world-wide with a substantial number of road tankers and SWAP bodies already configured throughout the world. Eltherm has various agents globally – with Uni Temp being the S.A local agent.

The solution suggested was not for the feint-hearted. Instead of building a tank with the normal layer of insulation between the tank and the outer skin, what was needed here was Super Insulation. The aim was to configure the insulation and design it to ‘drop’ off a degree every hour during transportation. And this for the worse case operating condition. 

To do this, more than two-thirds of the tank would have to be coiled with the Eltherm heating system elements, including the dished ends and the bottom outlet valve. Apart from this, a control panel as well as secondary mains power supply cable would have to be installed. In addition, all the tank equipment and valves would have to be designed and approved for elevated temperature operation. 

All well and good, but where does the power come from? For this, a generator set capable of delivering 440V/35 Amps power would have to be installed on the truck-tractor with a feed to the Eltherm control unit on the tank. Enter TRS, a well established European company with vast experience in the supply and operation of Hydro power gensets. 

The solution was to fit a genset onto the truck tractor which would be hydraulically powered off the truck tractor engine through the PTO and pump. And that’s what has been done. 

One might feel that all this extra equipment would have a huge impact on the payload due to the tare of the truck tractor and tanker being increased. Not so. The mass of the complete Eltherm system, including control panel and secondary mains power supply cable, is a mere 200 kgs while the genset adds 150 kg to the truck tractor’s tare. 

Apart from these innovations, the tank also had to be designed with the maximum slope angle and a further lowering rising valve fitted to enhance and accelerate the discharge process. The end result is a tanker with a 31 800 kg payload holding 31 000 litres of product. Apart from being SANS 1518/ADR compliant, it is also an industry first. 

Aside from the innovation exhibited in the design and development phases, what really struck me on that day was the great camaraderie that existed between the supplier of the tankers, GRW Engineering; the transporter, Manline; and the customer, ArcelorMittal South Africa. The spirit was such that it was as if all were working as one unit to achieve maximum success. 

Unified harmony

It was just so different to the adversarial vibes one picks up in the general freight haulage market where the complaint so often arises that customers manipulate transporters for their own gain, driving down rates and playing one transporter off against another to get the lowest rate. There was none of this vibe here. This was unified harmony is motion. Gee, even Manline’s drivers were there to celebrate. The drivers, by the way, had by that time already undergone stringent induction and training programmes on ArcelorMittal South Africa’s sites. 

Having attended the launch, I decided to hold off on the story at the time as, with such an innovative product, I thought it apt to bring our readers into the operational field. It was thus I arranged a visit to the ArcelorMittal South Africa plant in Vanderbijlpark to see the tankers on site after they had been operating for a few months. 

It’s quite a process getting into that place, especially if you’re wanting to take a camera inside but having gone through all the security and other clearances, I arrived on site to be met by Manline’s Lance Naude and a great guy by the name of Hennie Mocke, superintendant, blending and dispatch of Coal Tar products at ArcelorMittal South Africa Coke & Chemicals. 

Walking around the site, one begins to understand the necessity  for the comprehensive driver induction training programme which introduces and takes the contract drivers through all the on-site operational and safety procedures. If you’re not familiar with the site, just getting to the place where the Pitch is loaded will require a Garmin GPS navigation unit. The place is huge. 

Of course, training also had to be done in the loading and offloading procedures as it is dangerous territory this. If, for example, you put product heated to 200 °C into a tanker with water in it, you’ll get an explosion with product erupting out of the manhole like a mini-volcano. And you just don’t want that to happen. But, we’re happy to report that, after six months into the contract, all was going well. 

Teething problems 

It was not, however, without its initial teething problems. “It’s been an amazing learning curve. I did more learning in the first four months of this year I did in the whole of Standard 4,” quips Naude. 

Initial problems revolved mainly around the temperature settings on the tankers but in the true spirit of the superb supplier/customer relationship that dominates this contract, GRW flew in experts from  customer, BHP Billiton. Are they happy with it all? As mentioned earlier, the specific pitch has to be delivered at a certain temperature or BHP Billiton will not offload. Perhaps the fact that not one load in the six months since Manline has been handling the contract has been under-temperature tells this side of the story. 

With 6000 tons of product being hauled by 18 rigs every month, the success of this operation also says a lot for the wisdom of breeding a winwin relationship between all parties involved in transport contracts. Will other customers/shippers please learn from this?