This week’s Pipeliners Podcast episode features Weldon Wright, the General Manager of Gas Certification Institute (GCI), discussing how to improve oil and gas measurement through the use of measurement SOPs and training.

In this episode, you will learn about challenges in measurement related to RNG and hydrogen, the importance of measurement SOPs and training to get measurement right, and being aware of how changes to contracts and tariffs affect measurement.

As a bonus, Weldon and host Russel Treat discuss the new Oil & Gas Measurement Podcast that will be launching soon on the Pipeline Podcast Network! Listen until the end for a preview of the new podcast hosted by Weldon.

Oil & Gas Measurement Improvements: Show Notes, Links, and Insider Terms

• Weldon Wright is the General Manager of Gas Certification Institute (GCI). Connect with Weldon on LinkedIn.
  • Gas Certification Institute (GCI) provides crude, NGL, and gas measurement training, measurement standard operating procedures (SOPs), and field operations software tools.
  • Oil & Gas Measurement Podcast hosted by Weldon Wright will be launching on January 19, 2022, right here on the Pipeline Podcast Network!
• AGA (American Gas Association) represents companies delivering natural gas safely, reliably, and in an environmentally responsible way to help improve the quality of life for their customers every day. AGA’s mission is to provide clear value to its membership and serve as the indispensable, leading voice and facilitator on its behalf in promoting the safe, reliable, and efficient delivery of natural gas to homes and businesses across the nation.
  • The annual AGA Operations Conference is the natural gas industry’s largest gathering of natural gas utility and transmission company operations management from across North America and the world. During the conference, participants share technical knowledge, ideas, and practices to promote the safe, reliable, and cost-effective delivery of natural gas to the end-user.
    • The 2021 AGA Operations Conference & Biennial Exhibition & Fall Committee Meetings took place October 4-7 in Kissimmee, Florida at the Gaylord Palms hotel.
• Renewable Natural Gas (RNG) is a pipeline-quality gas that is fully interchangeable with conventional natural gas. The quality of RNG is similar to fossil natural gas and has a methane concentration of 90% or greater.
• Biogas is a renewable fuel produced by the breakdown of organic matter such as food scraps and animal waste. It can be used in a variety of ways including as vehicle fuel and for heating and electricity generation.
• British Thermal Unit (BTU) is the amount of energy needed to raise 1 pound of water by 1 degree Fahrenheit while at sea level.
• Entrained liquids (a/k/a wet liquids) are substances found in natural gas. Entrained liquid in a natural gas pipeline can be present in the form of a pool, film, small droplets, or aerosol.
• API (American Petroleum Institute) has developed more than 700 standards to enhance industry operations. Today, it is the global leader in convening subject matter experts to establish, maintain, and distribute consensus standards for the oil and natural gas industry.
• API 21.1 (Manual of Petroleum Measurement Standards) is the international standard that describes the minimum specifications for gas measurement systems of hydrocarbon and other related gases.
• AGA3 (Orifice Metering of Natural Gas And Other Related Hydrocarbon Fluids) is the standard for engineering equations, uncertainty estimations, construction and installation requirements, and standardized implementation recommendations for the calculation of flow rate through orifice meters.
  • Orifice Plate is a device used for measuring flow rate, reducing pressure, or restricting the flow of product flowing through a system.
• Ultrasonic Flow Meters measure the velocity of a fluid using ultrasound technology to calculate volume flow.
• Coriolis Meters measure mass flow of natural gas and liquid, as opposed to just volumetric flow. Either gas or liquid flows through a tube which is vibrated by a small actuator to create the measurement.
• Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) is a set of documents or manuals that provide explicit directions for completing certain measurement tasks. Measurement SOPs should contain: Guidelines and Requirements, Applicability, Frequency, Governance, and Control Evidence.
• Heavy Crude Oil (“Heavies”) is defined as any liquid petroleum with an API gravity less than 20°. Heavy crude oil has a more negative impact on the environment than its light counterpart since its refinement requires the use of more advanced techniques and the use of contaminants. It is referred to as “heavy” because its density or specific gravity is higher than that of light crude oil.
  • Light Crude Oil is liquid petroleum that has a low density and that flows freely at room temperature. It has low viscosity, low specific gravity, and high API gravity due to the presence of a high proportion of light hydrocarbon fractions. It generally has a low wax content as well. 
• L&U Reports capture the amount of lost-and-unaccounted-for gas during a specified period of time. L&U gas can create cost issues for pipeline operators that are unable to account for or recover lost gas.
• Robert Ward is an advisor, innovation advocate, and technology strategist in areas that include LPWAN, Edge Computing, and Sensor to SCADA to Cloud connectivity and migrations. Connect with Robert on LinkedIn.
  • Listen to Robert’s previous appearance on the Pipeliners Podcast.

Oil & Gas Measurement Improvements: Full Episode Transcript

Russel Treat:  Welcome to the Pipeliners Podcast, episode 212, sponsored by EnerSys Corporation, providers of POEMS, the Pipeline Operations Excellence Management System, compliance and operations software for the pipeline control center to address Control Room Management, SCADA, and audit readiness. Find out more about POEMS at EnerSysCorp.com.

[background music]

Announcer:  The Pipeliners Podcast, where professionals, Bubba geeks, and industry insiders share their knowledge and experience about technology, projects, and pipeline operations. And now, your host, Russel Treat.

Russel:  Thanks for listening to the Pipeliners Podcast. I appreciate you taking the time, and to show the appreciation, we give away a customized YETI tumbler to one listener every episode. This week, our winner is Clayton Rubach with Magellan Midstream. Congratulations, Clayton. Your YETI is on its way. To learn how you can win this signature prize, stick around for the end of the episode.

This week, Weldon Wright returns to talk about improving measurement through SOPs and training. Stick around to listen for a special announcement. Weldon, welcome back to the Pipeliners Podcast.

Weldon Wright:  Hey, Russel. It’s great to be back on again.

Russel:  What have you been up to since we last talked?

Weldon:  Lots and lots of stuff. I think when we last talked, we hadn’t been to AGA yet, so I was at the AGA Ops Conference in Florida, listening to a lot of great stuff from the Pipeline Measurement Group. Mainly, that it seems like the industry feels like we’re a little bit behind the curve on some of this RNG, renewable natural gas.

Probably, that extends into the concerns over hydrogen, as people try to figure out, hey, how do we measure this accurately? How do we control it accurately, and just what do we do with it, in some cases?

Russel:  What are some of the challenges with renewable natural gas that got talked about at the AGA?

Weldon:  Well, probably the biggest challenge is the thing we don’t want to talk about. This used to be called biogas. It was the thing that not many people produced. Those that produced it were sending it into a midstream system. A gatherer that knows how to treat and process natural gas was handling this stuff and making sure what went down to the pipelines was true pipeline quality spec.

Russel:  What does that mean, pipeline quality spec, for those that don’t know?

Weldon:  It depends upon whether you’re talking about RNG or what used to be pipeline quality gas. In other words, contaminants that don’t burn have been removed. There’s no oxygen in the product, and it doesn’t have a lot of contaminants that would foul up engines, boilers, or your home furnace.

Russel:  Also means that you’ve got pretty tight control over the BTU content and the entrained liquids, because that all messes with your home appliances.

Weldon:  Absolutely. Not only home appliances, but industry also. Industry’s become very used to having a consistent quality, consistent BTU product delivered to them. RNG changes some of those rules.

Companies that have never had to worry about the BTU once gas was brought into their system now are looking at it, because RNG is being brought into the system, sometimes right in the middle of distribution systems, very close to commercial and residential customers. A lot of new monitoring, a lot of new control is needed.

Russel:  That’s a pretty good segue. I know that hydrogen was talked about a lot at the AGA. It’s a good segue for what I asked you to come on to talk about, which is improving measurement through SOPs and training.

I think I’m going to ask this question, and I think we talked about this the last time you were on the podcast. For me, it’s always a good segue when you talk about measurement. That’s this, what’s the hardest part of getting measurement correct?

Weldon:  The hardest part of getting measurement correct is defining what correct is.

Russel:  [laughs] That’s so well said.

Weldon:  Here in the U.S., we’re not regulated on how we do measurement; in general, we’re not. It’s done through contracts, through tariffs, and most of those are reference industry standards. Even with all of that, what means correct in our particular term?

We’ve got to know the contractual terms. We’ve got to know which standards are referenced before we can say we’ve got it correct. Once we know what the definition of correct is, then we can start figuring out how we do it.

Russel:  Yeah, I think that’s extremely well said, Weldon, and the interesting thing I’m thinking about is a big issue that our industry had a number of years ago when we first started bringing shale gas into these gathering systems.

The focus historically had been on, well, let’s deliver the gas to a particular BTU. The delivery of that gas to a BTU was complicated by the fact that this shell gas was extremely liquids-rich, which meant I’m delivering the gas to the contract requirement, but I’m not really delivering gas that can be used at the burner tip, because there’s problems with these too much high BTU entrained liquids per relative volume of the gas. 

It’s interesting, because this whole idea about what correct is got shifted, because all of a sudden, people started going back and adjusting their tariffs and saying, “Well, wait a minute. I need it to this BTU, but I need no more than this amount of the heavies.”

Weldon:  That’s a little bit of what’s being seen with the RNG push that is, with more and more RNG coming into systems, that’s where the term interchangeability comes from. Interchangeability often seems to be somewhat code for, “Our gas is not quite compliant. How do we get it into your system?”

The RNG, in most cases, is having to be run through small treating facilities. They’re filtering. They’re trying to get it up to contract specifications, but in that world, you have really, really bad gas that came from a landfill or from digesters in city wastewater treatment plant, and they’re trying to clean it up to pipeline spec.

No pipeline can allow all of the gas they receive across their entire pipeline to always be at the very bottom of that specification. That inserts some challenges. How much gas can we take at the very bottom of that spec?

Since more and more and more gas is coming into the system that way, as opposed to conventional natural gas sources, we’re seeing companies, distribution systems, and pipelines having to reconsider and possibly rewrite their specs and their tariffs to better control and work with that, so we can successfully get this green energy into our system and to the end customers without causing problems to those customers.

Russel:  That’s actually, again, it’s a great segue, because my next question was, well, what ought to be in a measurement standard operating procedure? I’ll just make this assertion and let you speak to it.

I would say that the first step is I have to define what I’m looking for in terms of measurement. Not just volume, not just energy content, but also, what are the constituent properties? In other words, how clean and proper is the gas in the way it’s put together?

Weldon:  Correct.

Russel:  That all goes to how I’m going to do my measurement, right?

Weldon:  Right. Those SOPs need to begin with what are the standards, the regulations, and the contracts that we intend on our gas custody transfer to be held under? Really, to me, the first place you start with writing SOPs is to understand what do our contracts require and/or our tariffs require? And, if it’s BLM properties in the U.S., what do federal regulations require?

Once we know what those requirements are, we can begin to coin our SOPs around what’s required to meet those standards and/or those regulations. From that, we talk about the type of equipment that we’ll need in our SOPs. We talk about the processes and procedures that we’ll use. Of course, processes and procedures gets us to the point of what training do our folks have to have in order to properly implement those SOPs?

Russel:  Yeah. It starts with understanding your contracts and tariffs and making sure they’re appropriate for your operation. Then just moves to, okay, so how are we going to measure? That’s equipment, processes, and people.

Then, your SOPs have to address those three things. Then you’ve got to build competencies in the people to be able to operate the SOPs. That gets to the whole question about training. What kind of training is required? Or maybe a better way to ask it, what’s the training that often gets missed?

Weldon:  This almost gets to be a soapbox item for me, because the training we don’t want to have is “Bubba rides around in the truck,” right? Bubba may be a great guy. He may know a lot about measurement, but we need some fundamental knowledge set up for these people before we start riding around for on-the-job training.

I maintain that we need for our new hires in measurement, our transfers from other departments, we need those people to have a thorough understanding of the fundamentals behind measurement, whether it’s crude or gas.

We need to understand the calculations. We need to understand the physical properties of our product, and we need to understand how those pieces fit into the procedures we’ll use with individual pieces of equipment, individual manufacturers’ products, and the software tools that we use.

Starting, again, with the basic fundamentals, and that includes definitions/basic knowledge. Once we have that, then we start to add training for the specific flow computers, the specific meter types that are installed.

We look at vendor-specific and software-specific training. We look at what’s required to do the quality-analyzing, the BTU heating value, the specific gravity. All of those pieces only come to place once you understand the fundamentals well enough to talk about them.

We get those fundamentals out of the way, then we start the vendor-specific, device-specific training. Of course, OJT is a big part of that, but OJT needs to be done under relatively controlled situations. OJT does not take place in the middle of a blizzard when you’re trying to relight every pilot light in town, right?

OJT takes place under normal field operating conditions, where people are not stressed, where they’re in a reasonable environment where they can think about what they’re doing, not the big fire that’s burning in the plant next door.

Russel:  I think that’s a really good point. You covered that quickly, but you think about what part of that often gets missed. I think the part that often gets missed is the fundamentals.

Weldon:  Absolutely.

Russel:  Most people that start in measurement, they’re doing pretty routine, pretty simple. They’re running around, and they’re checking as-found, as-left, and doing calibrations. That’s a big part of that. You’ve got to be able to do that consistently, and do it well. It’s a big part of measurement, but that’s a relatively simple task.

I can do that without necessarily understanding a whole lot about how a measurement system operates. When I start getting into the questions about, well, how come my metering doesn’t balance? How come my number doesn’t match my interconnect partner’s number? Or, how come the volume coming into this gathering system isn’t matching the volume coming out? That all of a sudden becomes a different level of knowledge I need to be able to do that.

Weldon:  I agree with that, Russel, but even some of the very basic tasks need that fundamental knowledge also. One of my favorite examples of this is a relatively new technician. He’d been working for a company for about eight years in compressor maintenance, got moved over to measurement — he thought that was the dream job. Again, he’d been around the pipeline and the operations for many years. They put him in the truck. He went around. He learned to do the job. He learned to do meter calibrations. He learned to do testing, and he was pretty good at it.

We rarely are in a situation where we have a lot of people, more people than we need to do the job, and folks just standing around. Everybody’s pushed for time. Do more for less. This individual, who will remain nameless, he was out there looking at the procedure they had him doing for collecting samples.

That procedure took a long time, and it required his attention the whole time he was doing it. He figured out that it was real easy to cut that back a couple of steps, and he could save 10 to 15 minutes on every sample he collected, instead of going through this very lengthy fill and purge process on this low-pressure well.

He thought in his mind and in his heart he was saving the company money and doing a good job. In effect, what he was doing, because he didn’t understand the fundamentals and didn’t understand why the procedures called for him to do what he did, he effectively was pumping up the BTU value of every sample he collected. Its about BTUs.

Russel:  That’s no small thing.

Weldon:  No, it’s not. While I agree that many of the tasks don’t require fundamental knowledge day in and day out, not understanding those fundamentals really is a key. Again, once we have those first, then we start going through the training on specific procedures, how do we meet our SOP requirements for frequency of testing of the procedures being used. Then we also can get into vendor-specific training with specific devices.

Russel:  Yeah. Again, that all makes sense to me. I’d want to talk a little bit about diagnostics. What I mean by this is, when I’m doing the kinds of things that would typically be reserved for a measurement engineer or a consultant to look at, where I’m trying to resolve an imbalance or some other kind of problem on a system, what’s the level of training I need at that point?

Weldon:  The level of training you need to impact that type of problem is relatively small. It’s that understanding the fundamentals and understanding of your SOPs. But then, if you want to get into the hardcore diagnostics, it definitely takes something that really can only be gained through experience, Russel.

The pieces you’re looking at there is understanding what might be presenting biases on the system. You had asked earlier about, “What does it take to get measurement correct or right?” One of the biggest tools to knowing whether your measurement is correct to begin with is going to be sound system balances, intake and dispositions, and L&U reports, whatever your company calls them.

Having good balancing that’s watched, and maintained on a regular basis, is one of the quickest ways to pick up new problems. Then, by looking at those balances, which does get into advanced measurement…Let’s look at those balances, and let’s try to determine where the excursions are coming from on a daily or even an hourly basis.

It’s being able to look at the procedures and understand why we do procedures in a certain way and understand if we don’t do them in that way, how do we get the type of bad results that we have? Understanding what errors and failing to follow procedures can cause is one of those key things in being able to diagnose the problems and come up with solutions.

Russel:  Again, I think that’s really well said, Weldon, because at least in my experience in this domain, one of the first things you do when you’re trying to understand what’s going on is the first thing you do is you look all the basics.

You try to get an understanding of the numbers and how they’re being brought together. Then, once you have that, you’re looking at, well, what are the procedures, and are they being followed? A lot of times, what you find out is, when you start getting into the nitty-gritty details of something, the procedures are missing.

Now, the procedures may be too high level, or they’re too generic, or they don’t address this specific case or this specific kind of device or equipment you’re using in the field. That becomes a real problem.

Weldon:  Exactly. You touched on a couple of really important parts there, and I agree with all of them. To get out there and to try to look at those kinds of items, being able to…What’s the right word for it? Being able to objectively look at the procedures being used.

With reference to what you said about procedures being too generic, I see that all too often. I’ve seen measurement procedures that called out, “We will measure according to AGA3. We will measure according to API 21.1,” and that’s almost the limit of what they say.

Those are complex standards. There’s a lot of stuff in it, and any given operation is not going to have measurement take place under all of the possibilities that happen under all of those standards. That’s where written SOPs that specifically reflect your contracts and your tariffs become important.

Not only do we have a set of SOPs to begin with, your SOPs, like your training, cannot be static. You need to constantly be watching the standards your SOPs reference. You need to be constantly watching for changes in how your contracts and your tariffs work, what changes in product quality may take place.

You need to be watching all those things and make updates to your SOPs and your training to match those. We both know, in today’s age, the rate that hardware is changing and the software that supports that hardware is almost beyond what I can fathom when I got into this industry 30 plus years ago, right?

Russel:  Just the amount of equipment that we have available to us, and the complexity and the capability of that equipment. It’s grown exponentially, even in the last 10 years.

Weldon, we have a big announcement to make. We are putting together a new podcast, and Weldon is going to be the host. It’s going to be the Oil & Gas Measurement Podcast. This is something I’ve been wanting to add for a long time, probably because I started out in measurement, and I know a lot of people in that area of our business. I’m really excited about this, and I know Weldon is, too.

Weldon, what do you hope to accomplish as we roll out this new podcast on oil and gas measurement?

Weldon:  Russel, I installed my first flow meter back around 1985. In the last 37 years, there’s two things that I can now say for certain about measurement that are absolutely true. One of which is that the more I learn about measurement, the more I realize I still have a lot to learn.

The second is that disseminating measurement knowledge is not always easy, especially for new folks in our industry. There is so much out there, so many different things you may need to know, and not a lot of places that pull it all together.

What I want to accomplish with this podcast is I want to pull together those tidbits of information from all the different areas in measurement and start getting out there, so people have better access to it. We all know how much time we spent staring at that windshield.

If you can listen to a podcast while you find out about the latest AGA or API updates, if you can listen to a podcast talking about methane emissions and the new advances in detecting leaks, as well as how we can estimate volumes, if you can learn information about some of the latest technology coming out or what the problems are relating to green energy with RNG and hydrogen… If we can provide you little snippets of information while you drive site to site, I will consider it a grand success.

Russel:  I’m with you. I think measurement is one of those subjects where, by the time you’re current in all the disciplines, you’ve become out of date in the discipline you started with.

If I start working with gas orifice plates, and then I move from orifice plates to turbines, then I work for a while on Coriolis meters, and then I work on some analytical equipment, and then I come back to orifice meters, by the time you make that circuit, you come to take a deep dive into orifice meters, you’re not current anymore. It’s just the nature of things. That’s true throughout our industry. Being able to help people stay current, I think, is really important.

I think the other thing, too, is there are so many things that can happen that can cause your measurement to go askew that having a resource where you can go and listen and constantly be hearing about, “Here’s problems that occurred and lessons that we learned,” that’s just a huge value to the industry.

Weldon:  I agree, Russel, and we hope to get there with this new podcast. Like you said earlier, it excited me. When you first discussed this with me, it was a no-brainer for me to dive in with both feet, because it’s something I’m passionate about.

Russel:  Can you give us some teasers? What are you hoping to do or to talk about in some of the first episodes?

Weldon:  In some of the episodes are some of the items I just mentioned earlier. We are going to have some updates on what’s happening with AGA and API. One of our earliest episodes will be an update on what’s going on at API with produced water, about how we measure, and how we account for produced water.

We’ll have Robert Ward on one of our early episodes, and he’s going to talk about advances in methane leak detection and how some of those advances can lead us to actually measuring, or at least estimating measurement, of those leaks.

We’re going to talk about data mining and statistical analysis of your measurement data to help you set better validation rules while reducing the number of nuisance exceptions you see in your measurement system. So, great stuff like that.

Russel:  Listen, I’m looking forward to it. I’m also excited that we’re adding a new host to what we’re doing, because as much as I enjoy this, there are only so many hours in a day. I will tell you that it’ll be very interesting for you and me to have this conversation in a year or two, once you’ve done a bunch of these episodes.

I suspect you’re going to learn just as much as the listeners as you go through and do all that, because that’s certainly been my experience as I’ve been doing this podcast.

Weldon:  I expect that to be the case. In fact, I’m looking forward to an excuse to get people in front of me that I can quiz on about stuff I need to learn.

Russel:  Just for the listeners, that new podcast, we will be standing that up shortly after the first of the year. We’re looking forward to getting people to listen, hearing the feedback, and learning what people would like to know.

Weldon:  I’m also open to any and all topics. Feel free to send in suggestions. We’ll take a look at it. Suggestions on topics, or specific suggestions on a guest. If you feel like you have something to share directly on the podcast, by all means, let me know. We’ll see about getting you on.

Russel:  If you want to give us some ideas, there’s a couple of ways to do that. One way would be just go to the Pipeliners Podcast website. Go to the Contact Us page, and just drop us a form. I look at every single one of those. Anything that’s going to be relative to the oil and gas measurement podcast, I’ll get that right over to Weldon, and he’ll be following up. You can also go to the podcast website, look up Weldon’s profile page, get his connection on LinkedIn, and you can reach out to him directly on LinkedIn.

Either of those would be good vehicles for sharing your thoughts and interests and helping us put together something that’d be of value to the listeners.

Weldon:  You’re exactly right there, Russel. We look forward to it. We want to deliver a product that people are finding valuable and are ready for the next episode to be dropped. The more suggestions we get, the more powerful we can make this podcast.

Russel:  Listen, I think that’s a great place to end this episode, and looking forward to you having great success.

Weldon:  Thanks a lot, Russel.

Russel:  Hope you enjoyed this week’s episode of the Pipeliners Podcast and our conversation with Weldon. Just a reminder before you go. You should register to win our customized Pipeliners Podcast YETI tumbler. Simply visit pipelinerspodcast.com/win to enter yourself in the drawing.

If you’d like to support the podcast, please leave us a review on Apple Podcast, Google Play, or on your smart device podcast app. You could find instructions at pipelinerspodcast.com.

Russel:  If you have ideas, questions, or topics you’d be interested in, please let me know on the Contact Us page at pipelinerspodcast.com or reach out to me on LinkedIn. 

Transcription by CastingWords