Diesel is the largest single cost in running a haulage company and the only one that moves while you sleep. It is priced and sold here in kilos, which is how a fuel supplier actually invoices a depot delivery — around $1.45 a kilo, or roughly $1.20 a litre, which is European commercial diesel before tax.
A kilo is not an abstraction. A 40-tonne artic on a European round trip burns seven or eight hundred of them, and that single number tells you more about the leg than any cost sheet: it is why an empty slot still burns, and why the truck that arrives full and the truck that arrives half full cost almost exactly the same to send.
You buy diesel before you burn it, store it in a tank with a real limit, and pay whatever the market asks on the day — unless you have signed a contract that says otherwise.
That last part is where the game gets interesting. A fuel contract is a bet on where the price is going, made against a market that does not know you exist.
Diesel and CO₂ allowances both have a price that updates every half hour. The price is synthetic — it is not a live feed from a commodity exchange — but the way it behaves is calibrated against real road fuel statistics: it drifts, it reverts towards a long-run mean of $1.45 a kilo inside a band from $1.00 to $2.20, and it occasionally moves further than anybody expected.
Carbon sits around $35 a tonne. That is a weighted world average and it is deliberately lower than the European headline: the EU's ETS2 covers road fuel inside the union only, and most of the kilometres in this game are driven outside it.
You cannot run without diesel in the tank. You can run without allowances — the uncovered emissions are simply bought on the spot at 75% over the market, added to that departure's cost sheet. A standing auto-buy order cuts the premium to 15%, which turns the penalty into a convenience fee — still dearer than covering yourself at a price dip, which is the entire skill. Nothing breaks and nobody's reputation burns while you are away; you just pay a standing order you never signed, and the spread between a dip and the spot surcharge is real money on a busy schedule.
The market page keeps a history so you can see where the price has been. That history is the only forecasting tool you get, and it is worth more than it looks: a price well below its long-run average is a different proposition to the same price on the way up.
Diesel does not appear when you need it. You buy it, it sits in your storage, and the storage has a capacity you can outgrow. Running a large fleet with a small tank means buying constantly at whatever the price happens to be — which is exactly the position you do not want to be in when the price spikes.
A diesel depot raises your capacity. Each level doubles what you can hold, which turns storage from a chore into a strategy: with enough capacity you can buy heavily when fuel is cheap and simply not buy at all for a while when it is not. The depot does not discount the fuel itself, and that is deliberate — the value of storage should be the timing it buys you, not a quiet rebate.
A contract locks a price per kilo for a fixed number of weeks, against a volume you commit to taking every week. Every week of the contract, the fuel is delivered and the money leaves your account whether you loaded a trailer or not.
The price you are offered depends on four things you control or can see:
None of those terms is a fixed switch. The offer moves continuously as you change the volume and the length, and it moves as the market does — a contract quoted this morning is not the contract quoted this afternoon.
A contract is a genuine commitment. If you sign for more fuel than you can burn, the fuel still arrives and still gets paid for, and it goes into a tank that may not have room for it. If the spot price falls below your contract price, you are the haulier paying above the market, week after week, until the contract runs out.
You can break a contract. It costs a fifth of everything remaining on it, which is usually more than the mistake was worth and occasionally less. Deciding which is which is the whole point.
The honest summary is that diesel rewards patience and punishes drift. A haulier who buys reactively — a little, whenever the tank runs low — pays close to the average price forever. One that watches the history, holds capacity, and commits when the market is high pays less than the average, and takes on a real risk of paying more.
See also The economy and Facilities.
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