Can you haul Crude Oil on a Vacuum Trailer?

Most water haulers in TX don't have HazMat. Most of the companies hauling only have a couple of placarded trucks if any. They pay a buck or two an hr more for those drivers. Guess they pickup the 11% + you are referring to. Most of N TX is gas without that much oil in water.

 

Yes, you can use a vac truck to haul crude. The thing is with vac trailers, capacity is 5,040 gallons or so. 120 bbls vs the 150 bbl or so the crude tanks can carry. So the efficiency and productivity is out the door. Another thing is vac trailers dont usually have drilock connections so loading from an arm is out of the question. You would have to load from rear using facility pump and dome must be opened for loading just so you have a visual of the load capacity. The problem with opening the dome is now you have vapors in the air. Pray that no one is doing hotwork by you.
My company just finished doing a job for a refinery in Bakersfield and they hired a crap load of companies to haul crude to the chevron tanks 20 miles away. I was the only vac truck there. Thats how I know this. Imo, it was a funny thing to be the only vac truck there. I felt special

 

Sure they can. I've hauled crude in a vac truck a bunch of times. If you're on a flowback you can bet there will be times when oil that has settled in the flowback tanks will need to be transfered to the oil tanks. The trick is to make sure you are properly grounded because the pumps on vac trucks are not safely designed to move crude like roper and hydraulic pumps are. You won't see many doing it though because it isn't cost effective to use vacs to haul crude to refineries (130 bbls vs. 180-200 bbl crude haulers). If a vac is hauling crude, nine times out of ten it will just be on location. The scrubbers are irrelevent because they are designed to simply help prevent overflow. With all that said, any fluid you haul other than F/W will have a certain percentage of oil or chemicals in it. And, no one I know takes the time to measure that percentage. Whether it's 10% or 20%, you just load and go. Whatever it takes to get the job done and make the company man happy.

 

I cant imagine CARB is OK with using a vac truck. You had to open the dome so you obviously were not using VR. If you ever even crack the seal on a dome in a Western Refining property you get a lifetime ban (unless its their fault that you domed out). I opened one in Gallup NM when my internal had an airleak so I wasnt sure it emptied (unloading trans-mix) completely. Three operators came out, they were VERY COOL. They said if I ever open one again on Refinery property they would escort me out and I could never enter their plant again.

I can understand not using VR with Crude in any other state but California treats crude just like gasoline dont they?

 

It's definitely a safety issue. Vac pumps produce static electricity, hence making sure you're properly grounded.