When Linde Canada Limited announced in August 2014 that it had identified nearly 2,000 cylinders that were previously considered lost or stolen, it drew attention to an often unspoken concern in the gases industry.
Over a nine-month period, the company ‘found’ almost 1,900 cylinders and credited the appropriate customer account for the returned vessels. The cylinders were found using Linde Canada’s recently introduced Individual Cylinder Control (ICC) service, a professional approach to cylinder tracking and management that helps streamline the process and reduce the time it takes to track the whereabouts of cylinders – which can result in substantial cost savings for the customers.
But how did these assets fall off the radar in the first place? The gases industry loses cylinders each year in a number of ways. A quick and rough assessment on 2013 UK trade by the British Compressed Gases Association (BCGA) and UKLPG suggested the total losses might be in the tens of thousands of cylinders, representing millions of pounds in asset values, with similar scale losses on the LPG side of things. Across the Atlantic to North America, and Linde Canada acknowledged that in the case of its ‘missing’ 1,900 cylinders, the replacement cost of those assets alone would have been around $370,000 (2014).
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