Berrys Technologies, the maker of the Midas range of fuel sensor valves, brought its Midas Elbow to the United States in 2026. It is a portable hose fitting that reads an RFID tag at the forecourt storage tank and keeps its own shut-off valve closed if the fuel about to be delivered is the wrong grade. It arrives in a market where RFID-verified fuel deliveries are not new: Civacon, a brand of OPW, unveiled its Cross-Over Prevention System at the National Tank Truck Carriers show in Houston in October 2014 and has shipped it ever since.
The story is not that both companies use RFID to stop cross-drops. It is that they disagree about how far an identifier should be trusted.
The problem, in numbers
A cross-drop is what happens when a tanker driver connects to the wrong fill point and puts one product into a tank holding another: one octane grade into the tank meant for a different one, or the expensive version, diesel into gasoline. Writing in Bulk Distributor in September 2022, Civacon’s Mark Dudley put the US national rate at roughly one octane mix per 14,000 deliveries and one diesel or gasoline mix-up per 45,000 drops. Small numbers per delivery, large numbers across a fleet making thirty stops a day.
The cost is what makes it a board-level problem. Dudley put cleanup at a large site at up to US$100,000 per incident. Terry Tesch, general manager at RB Stewart Petroleum Products in Angleton, Texas, framed it by volume: “When you’re talking about 40,000 gallons, a cross-drop dramatically increases the cost of clean-up”. Berrys quotes a similar ceiling once damages, insurance claims, uplifts, downtime and reputational loss are added up.
Civacon’s approach: trust the tag
COPS works in three steps. A Smart Elbow sits between the delivery hose and the trailer’s API coupler at one end, and the underground tank’s adaptor at the other. That adaptor carries RFID tags encoding the grade the tank holds. The Smart Elbow reads the tag and passes the grade data to the trailer’s onboard controller, which compares it against the compartment the driver is about to discharge. If the products do not match, flow is blocked.
It is an identity check, and a clean one. The system asks what the tank says it is, matches that against what is in the compartment, and unlocks the valve only on agreement. Civacon extended the idea in 2019 with CivaCommand, a touchscreen tank controller adding overfill monitoring, electronic grade indicators and stored delivery records, with Smart Elbow integration unlocking the valve automatically on a correct connection. RB Stewart, a Texas carrier moving over 500 million gallons a year, had 37 CivaCommand units fitted as of September 2022. Drivers tend to rate the system for the pause it forces rather than the block it enforces: Steve Medley of Star Transport told Fuels Market News in March 2015 that “it just allows you to think before you drop…makes you slow down.”
Berrys’ approach: trust the tag, then check the fuel
MIDAS stands for mis-fuel identification and avoidance system, and the RFID half is similar in principle. Tags are permanently installed in the spill buckets at the tank. On connection they calibrate the valve and load it with site data, including the full site address, as well as telling it which grade belongs in that tank. Correct fuel and the valve opens; incorrect and it stays shut, an audible alarm sounds and the driver gets an alert message.
The difference sits downstream of the tag. MIDAS also carries optical fuel identification sensing, reading optical density and refractive index alongside a thermistor, so the device forms its own view of what is actually passing through the elbow rather than acting on the identifier alone. A stepper motor drives a butterfly shut-off valve, Bluetooth links the unit to the MIDAS Link communications modem, and time-stamped events are held in non-volatile memory. Berrys sells five configurations, from the portable Elbow for below-ground fills in spill buckets to a Fixed unit pre-calibrated to a single tank, and lists UL1203, UL429, IECEx and ATEX certification.
Martin Berry, CEO of Berrys Technologies US, said the system “has been a major player in Europe and the UK for years”. Berrys says Midas has run there for close to a decade, tested at -30F in Russia and above 100F in Middle East desert conditions.
Powering it is a problem in itself, because a portable elbow cannot be mains fed. An internal axial impeller turbine harvests energy from the fuel passing through at 200 to 400 gallons per minute, and Berrys says an average eight-minute delivery replenishes up to 11% of battery capacity, so with up to 30 stops a day the turbine keeps the pack charged across a shift. The pack, developed with Tadiran, uses three industrial-grade TLI-1550 rechargeable lithium-ion cells supplying the 1.7 ampere pulses that drive the valve.
Why the design difference matters
An identifier can be correct while the world is wrong. A tag never reprogrammed after a tank was re-graded will authorise exactly the delivery that should be refused, and it will do so confidently. Water ingress is invisible to any identity check at all, because nothing about the tag has changed. Fluid sensing catches both cases; tag matching catches neither, and Berrys markets Midas as detecting incorrect fuel types or water dilution for that reason.
The counter-argument is just as real. Trusting the tag means fewer moving parts, no optical path to keep clean, no recalibration, lower power draw and a decade of field history behind a design that has not needed to change. Adding sensors adds failure modes, and a false positive that refuses a correct delivery carries its own cost in driver time and confidence. Anyone following RFID sensing will recognise the trade-off from everywhere else a tag is asked to stand in for a measurement.
What neither company publishes
Neither Berrys nor Civacon states an operating frequency for the RFID link. Both describe short-range communication between a tag fixed at the tank or fill adaptor and a reader inside the elbow, across a gap of centimetres, and that is as far as either will go publicly. Anyone specifying either system alongside existing tagged asset infrastructure, or worried about coexistence in a congested forecourt sump, will have to ask the manufacturer directly. Definitions of tag types, read ranges and coupling methods are collected in the RFID News glossary.
Treat the results as vendor figures
The fullest published account of the MIDAS architecture appeared in Bulk Transporter on 8 September 2026, bylined by Sean Berry, technical sales director at Berrys Technologies. It is a contributed piece from the manufacturer, not independent reporting, and its numbers read accordingly. Berrys puts installations worldwide at over 5,000, and reports that Fronk Oil, a Texas fuel carrier, fitted MIDAS elbows across its fleet, got real-time alerts on attempted cross-drops, lost no time once drivers had adapted, and secured what it calls a healthy reduction in insurance premiums after presenting the technology to its insurer. None of that is independently verified, and the insurance outcome is worth testing with your own underwriter. The Civacon material carries the same caveat: the 2015 and 2022 articles were both written by Civacon people.
