The 5-Day Queue Feeding a 3-Day Fuel Tank

Airports store about three days of jet fuel. The pipeline that feeds them runs on a five-day cycle. Neither clock divides into the other. A multi-product pipeline like Colonial doesn't flow — it queues. Gasoline, diesel, heating oil and jet fuel move nose to tail in a repeating five-day sequence at roughly five miles per hour, so a barrel scheduled in Houston reaches New York harbor two to three weeks later. Meanwhile IATA's Guidance on Airport Fuel Storage Capacity sets a benchmark of about three days' demand at a pipeline-supplied depot, built up from customs, shipping variability and quality-control delays. We read Colonial's own shipper manual, the IATA guidance including its Heathrow worked example, and EIA jet fuel demand and refinery yield data — including the one line where the operator waives its minimum batch size for aviation kerosene on the delivery lines serving airports, at exactly the point where the downstream buffer is thinnest. Then: who actually absorbs the mismatch. Watch next: "Why Power Plants Lose Gas First in a Freeze" — another case of two networks that are one machine physically and two contracts on paper. #jetfuel #pipelines #infrastructure Chapters: 0:00 Two Clocks 0:59 The Three-Day Benchmark 2:42 A Pipeline Is a Queue 3:15 The Five-Day Cycle 3:47 Speed and Scale 5:16 Booking a Slot Weeks Early 5:50 Minimum Batch Sizes 6:36 The Jet Fuel Exemption 7:14 No Room to Pump Faster 8:13 Sized in Cycles, Not Days 8:59 The Heathrow Example 9:40 Planning for Disruption 10:42 The Honest Counterweight 12:14 Who Carries the Difference 12:29 A Place in the Queue