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Bulk Liquid & Fuel Glossary
Bulk liquid distribution runs on vocabulary that is precise inside the industry and opaque outside it. A load can carry two products on one bill of lading, arrive smaller than it left, and be priced off a number that changed this morning — none of which is obvious from the words used to describe it.
These are plain definitions of the terms that actually matter operationally, written for someone who has to work with them rather than pass a test on them.
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Rack pricing
The wholesale, per-gallon price a terminal posts for fuel collected at its loading rack — republished as often as daily, and the number most of this industry buys against.
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Gross vs net gallons
Why the gallons on the invoice are not the gallons on the meter, and why a load that left full can arrive measurably smaller without anything going wrong.
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Bill of lading (BOL)
The document issued at each pickup stop declaring what was actually loaded. One order can carry several, and each can list more than one product.
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Fuel allocation
The volume a supplier commits to you at a given terminal over a given period — and what happens when a cold snap consumes it by the third week.
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Split load
One pickup, several drops. Why the last stop on the run is the one whose invoice never quite matches the plan.
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Delivery ticket
What came off the truck, signed at the drop. The document an invoice should be built from — and the reason billing from the order causes disputes.
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Loading number
The supplier-issued authorisation a driver needs at the rack. It encodes carrier, terminal and destination together, which is why a per-supplier default is always eventually wrong.
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Carded terminal
Permission to load at a rack. A hard filter on which loads a carrier can take at all, and the source of card-in and card-out times.
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Jobber
Buys at the rack, resells downstream, carries the price risk in between. The US term for the middle tier of the fuel trade.
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Blind bid
Carriers price without seeing each other. Why bulk liquid bids blind while dry van often does not — and why a lot of freight never goes to auction at all.
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Load board vs TMS
One finds the freight, the other runs it. The gap between them is where the retyping, the phone calls and the lost loads live.
Suggest a term
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Why we publish this
Energy Connect builds software for the bulk liquid supply chain — petroleum, propane, lubricants and chemicals moving from a terminal rack to an end user's tank. Every term here is something the platform models directly, so the definitions come from how the trade actually works rather than from a dictionary.