Emerson’s Trilochan Gupta presented US$ 7 Billion/Year of Custody Transfer for the World’s Longest Heated and Insulated Pipeline. His abstract:
Cairn Energy India Ltd (CEIL) developed a Crude Oil License Block RJ-ON-90/1 in the state of Rajasthan, India. The crude oil sales were successfully implemented using Liquid Ultrasonic flow meter on a large commercial scale. The use of Liquid Ultrasonic Meters for Crude Oil custody transfer is gaining worldwide acceptance. Ultrasonic technology is an established technology but the use of this technology for custody transfer is relatively new. Often users try to employ the same measurement practices that apply to turbine technology to the Liquid Ultrasonic Meter.
The Mangala region crude oil is extremely thick and does not flow without being heated. The site has a current production rate of 125,000 barrels per day. Production is expected to grow to 250,000 barrels per day. The prover is isolated but must be heated and insulated to perform the proving operations.
Liquid Ultrasonic meters were used to measure the flow rates for the proving process. Proving verifies the performance of the measurement to accurately account for the flow that changes hands from one business entity to another. Per the API 4.8, the repeatability must be 0.027% for 3 proving runs. A table shows the number of runs required to verify a certain level of repeatable performance. The goal is get within the 0.027% repeatability with the fewest number of proving runs.
For this project, the pipeline operators wanted the custody transfer stations to follow a standard approach. Since the oil was so thick, the project team did not want a large prover to to have quicker site proving and easier site verification. The metering skid contained a crude oil metering skid, compact prover skid, and auto sampling skid, control panel, and piping & instrumentation.
Trilochen shared that the meters can be monitored remotely to verify performance by the Emerson project team when requested by the pipeline operators.
