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Safe haven for multi-modal deliveries
A new Transit Safety Port (TSP) for storing ethylene oxide shipped from the Netherlands to Italy provides a safe and secure stopping-off point for product until it can complete its final journey to customers.
This facility ensures that hazardous product is not parked alongside public roads, but kept in a safe and secure area.
The Transit Safety Port in northern Italy ensures hazardous product is not parked close to built up areas or alongside public roads while en route to customers, but is kept under cover in a safe and secure area where professional emergency response is available.
This part of Italy is home to a large ethoxylation industry which, with no local producers, has to rely on ethylene oxide (EO) shipped from other parts of Europe. For Shell customers this involves a long multi-modal delivery journey from the Netherlands using rail and road freight transport.
The distances involved, complexity of intermodal transport scheduling and regulatory restrictions had in the past created challenges for timing the arrival of deliveries at customer premises.
Ettore Mastromatteo, Senior Sales Manager EO/Glycols
“Regulations in Italy strictly limit the volume of EO that can be stored on the customer’s premises,” explains Ettore Mastromatteo, Senior Sales Manager EO/Glycols in Europe. “As a result, even scheduled deliveries could be turned away because product was already stored on the site,” he explains.
In these cases the business had to either find an alternative user to take the product or return it to the transport company’s depot until the customer was in a position to unload.
“Although there are no restrictions on parking an EO road tanker within a depot, or even by the side of the road, this is not acceptable to us from a product stewardship perspective,” explains Riccardo Magliocchi, Shell Chemicals HSSE (health, safety, security and environment) Specialist. “This has been a persistent issue for all EO suppliers in Italy and we felt it was time to find a more sustainable solution,” he says.
Shell worked with its transport provider and a local customer to develop a more permanent storage solution. This involved finding a suitable site and constructing a Transit Safety Port (TSP), where the EO ISO tank containers can be held under controlled conditions until customers are ready to receive them.
The TSP is a permanently manned open warehouse with hard standing for up to ten trailers. It is equipped with vapour monitoring sensors, an automatic sprinkler system for cooling the ISO tank containers in the case of high temperatures, or for dilution of product in the event of a minor spill, and a water recovery system.
The site is away from built-up areas and has been designed according to Shell’s HSSE requirements. The location and delivery routes were also audited and approved by Shell HSSE experts before construction began.
Shell has leased half of the TSP’s capacity and hopes that other EO producers will follow its example. “Implementing improvements to our EO logistics operations further demonstrates our commitment to product stewardship and to managing a safe supply chain,” says Mastromatteo.
This feature was added to the Innovations section in October 2011