In this episode of the Oil & Gas Measurement Podcast, host Weldon Wright speaks with John McDaniel about tackling issues related to “loss and unaccountable” gas in the oil and gas industry.

John shares insights from his extensive career in gas measurement, touching on common challenges in identifying and addressing unaccounted-for losses. The conversation highlights the importance of proper communication, field audits, and troubleshooting to maintain effective gas measurement systems and minimize operational discrepancies.

Loss and Unaccounted Show Notes, Links, and Insider Terms

• Lost and Unaccountable (UA): Refers to discrepancies between the amount of gas entering a system and the amount delivered. “Lost” implies physical losses, while “unaccountable” means the loss can’t be explained or identified through measurement or estimation.
• Receipts: The amount of gas that enters the pipeline system at the “input” points. This is contrasted with dispositions (the gas delivered or sold).
• Dispositions: The gas that leaves the system, either through sale, delivery, or other end uses like venting or flaring. The difference between receipts and dispositions helps identify any losses.
• Flaring: The controlled burning of natural gas, often for safety or operational reasons. From a measurement standpoint, flared gas should be accounted for to minimize unaccountable loss.
• Venting: The release of gas into the atmosphere, typically for safety reasons or during maintenance. Like flaring, it should be measured or estimated to ensure it’s not classified as unaccountable.
• Field Audit: A thorough review of field operations, equipment, and procedures to identify measurement discrepancies or issues. This often involves interviewing field personnel and reviewing past records.
• Line Pack: Refers to the amount of gas stored in the pipeline at any given time. Variations in line pack can affect the balance of receipts and dispositions, potentially leading to measurement discrepancies.
• RTD (Resistance Temperature Detector): A device used to measure temperature in pipelines. Proper placement of the RTD in the gas stream is crucial for accurate measurement, as temperature plays a key role in determining gas volume.
• Thermal Well: A protective casing used to insert temperature measurement devices like RTDs into a pipeline. Incorrect positioning of the RTD tip within the thermal well can cause significant measurement errors.
• Segmentation: The practice of dividing a pipeline or system into smaller, manageable sections for more precise tracking of receipts, dispositions, and losses. Segmentation helps isolate and identify where losses may be occurring.
• Backroom Procedures: Office-based processes that support field operations, including the tracking and recording of measurement data. Errors in these procedures can contribute to unaccounted-for losses.
• Audit: A comprehensive evaluation of both field operations and back-office procedures aimed at identifying discrepancies or inefficiencies in gas measurement. Audits help pinpoint the sources of unaccounted losses.
• Line Balances: A method of comparing gas input and output at various points in the pipeline to ensure there is no unaccounted-for loss. Line balances can help pinpoint where losses are occurring.
• Vapor Recovery: A system used to capture gas that would otherwise be lost during the production or transportation process. Implementing vapor recovery can reduce both accountable and unaccountable losses.
• Unmeasured Gas: Gas that has moved through or out of the system without being tracked by measurement equipment. This leads to unaccounted-for losses, which can create discrepancies in reporting.

Loss and Unaccounted Full Episode Transcript

Weldon Wright: Hello, and welcome to episode 37 of the “Oil and Gas Measurement Podcast,” sponsored by GCI, the Gas Certification Institute. For more than 20 years, GCI has been providing measurement fundamentals training and measurement standard operating procedures to the oil and gas industry.

GCI’s instructor-led classes in gas measurement and liquid measurement, coupled with a comprehensive measurement standard operating procedures will provide valuable tools for both the back office and field personnel.

[background music]

Announcer: Welcome to the Oil and Gas Measurement Podcast where measurement professionals, bubba geeks, and gurus share their knowledge experience and likely a tall tale or two on measurement topics for the oil and gas industry. And now, your host, Weldon Wright.

Weldon: Hello and welcome to the Oil & Gas Measurement Podcast. I’m your host, Weldon Wright, with FpvPrime Measurement Consulting. I’m on the phone today with John McDaniel. John is going to talk to us a little bit about loss and unaccountable, and how to chase these problems down.

John, before we do that though, tell us a little bit about yourself and what your career has been like, and what you’re doing today.

John McDaniel: Hey, Weldon. Thank you very much. I appreciate you inviting me on your show. Like you did say, we have known each other for quite some time, been in the industry together. My career started, I was a clerk in a little grocery store. Big money was being made in the oil and gas business, so I went to work on a drilling rig.

I spent about a year on a drilling rig. That year was one of the better jobs that I ever had. You’re saying, “Oh my God. This guy came off a drilling rig saying it was a great job.” Let me explain. When I was on a drilling rig, I realized that there has to be a better way to make a living.

I got an opportunity for a gas measurement job. Took a big pay cut, but I realized that this was an opportunity for an actual career instead of just making the evening tour one evening. When I did manage to get a job in production and in the measurement field, I took care of it. I turned it into a career, and I was there 40-plus years.

Just recently — well, recently, it’s been several years ago now — I retired from Williams after a stint with many major, minor pipeline gas measurement service companies.

I worked everything from production to transmission, and it was quite an education going through. I still do a little bit of consulting. Matter of fact, I spent five and a half years with Rick Feldman in Feldman Consulting, or Feldman Associations.

Oil/gas prices were $10, $12 in MCF. That faded out finally, and I ended up working for, finally, Williams, which I retired from, like I said, back a few years ago. I stayed true to measurement all the way through, and it’s been very good to me, actually.

Weldon: I know you’re still doing a little training here and there, a little bit of consulting, John. Am I correct, you’ll be at ASGMT in about two weeks doing a presentation there, won’t you?

John: Oh, yes. There are several presentations that I’ve been doing for years at the American School. I’ve also done presentations at ISHM and Appalachian Gas Measurement Short Course. Been around a while, done a few things, seen a few things.

Weldon: Great, John. What we’re here about today is to talk about lost and unaccountable. A lot of different labels get put on that. UA, lost and unaccountable, balance, whatever label you put on it.

Overall, that’s the reporting we do at the end of the month, at the end of the day, or maybe even at the end of the hour at some companies, that tells us, “Are we managing to sell everything we paid for, everything we brought into the system? How efficiently are we operating? Are we losing?”

Let’s take a couple of minutes, talk to us a little bit about how we would know we had a problem. How does that work? How do we discover there’s a problem?

John: Let’s get into the lost and unaccountable. First, you realize that you’re not getting as much gas at the end of the system as you put in the front end. Your receipts are larger than your actual dispositions.

That creates a problem, and even though you have losses, and if they’re unaccountable, that means they just disappear. If they’re accountable, you have reasons for these losses, and you can say, “Here’s the reason we have these losses. That’s not good, but at least it’s not like a big mystery.”

Weldon: That’s one of the things that I want to make sure we get clear to our listeners, John, is that difference you just discussed. In measurement, we want to account for every molecule of gas. From a measurement perspective, we’re doing a good measurement job if we measure gas that we know left the system.

If it was flared, if it was vented, if we lost it in a leak and we estimated the leak properly, if we’re using a fuel and we measure or estimate that fuel properly, from a measurement standpoint, we think we’re doing a good job.

Now, from the company standpoint, that’s still gas we don’t get to deliver on the other end and we don’t get money for, but from a measurement standpoint, we know about it. That unaccountable is the big piece where measurement has to churn and try to figure out what’s going on, isn’t it?

John: Absolutely. When you’re standing there in front of your VP of operations, or better, and you have a loss issue that is unaccounted for, that means you may not be doing a very good job of your actual measurement duties, and now we have mystery losses that are, as we said, unaccounted for.

Weldon: John, you’re exactly right about that difference between, did we really lose the gas and we know why we lost the gas? That’s the kind of thing that management can work on. They can go look at, how do we reduce the leaks on the system? Do we need to replace old pipe? Do we need to put in vapor recovery?

Management can deal with those things, but it’s that unknown, that unaccountable, we just didn’t get to sell it, we don’t have a clue. That’s when temperatures start to rise, blood pressure starts to rise in those cornered offices, isn’t it?

John: That’s when you’re starting to affect things like performance bonuses. That gets the attention. One of the things that I’ve discussed many times with measurement classes is that we’re a cost of business. We’re zero-sum game. We do everything perfect, we end up zero balance.

Everything is wonderful, except we cannot make the money that someone making a huge deal with an outside company, say, can make. However, our actual purpose is to keep the money from hemorrhaging from the company we’re working for.

If we do a good measurement job, we can account for everything that we’ve got, we should have, we end up without having at the end of the outlet. We can account for that, just like you mentioned earlier.

Weldon: It’s a double-edged sword. If we’re doing our job, nobody thinks about measurement, nobody works about measurement, and measurement can’t get the money we need to install new equipment, to upgrade, and maybe in some companies even staff correctly.

Let that unaccountable number pop up. Just to clarify, and we’re going to talk about this here in a few minutes, unaccountable doesn’t mean measurement’s doing a bad job. It means we don’t know where we lost the gas. It could be unknown true losses. The moment that unaccountables become high, all of a sudden, measurement gets to be the most popular people in the building, don’t they?

John: Absolutely. Suddenly, it goes from the obscure cabinet positions and where to right up front and center. That’d be correct.

Weldon: I’ve had way more attention many times in my career than I really wanted to, and in some cases, we find out that the problem is not measurement, but in a lot, we find out it’s stuff we’re doing there.

That’s a great transition into, once we know that we have a problem, once we’ve identified something’s going on, let’s talk with the listeners a little bit, John, about where do we start looking?

What are the first things that we do when the VP comes storming down to John’s offices, “My God, John, our unaccountable is up high. We’re losing money. You got to fix it”? What’s the first thing you do?

John: The first thing you have to, like you say, recognize a problem and try to figure out where this problem is coming from.

Now, if you have segmented line balances, which means maybe you’ve got 10 stations coming into a common point, and these are separate balancing systems, you have a pretty good chance of being able to pinpoint at least which system is giving you a big issue. If you can do this, then you can pound it down pretty quickly.

However, if you have 500 wells that are all joined together into a single common point, and suddenly, you have a big loss and unaccountable issue, you’re looking at it with a shotgun approach. You’re just trying to figure out what could possibly be going on.

My first inclination is to pull several months of hourly, monthly, daily histories of all the possible places this could be going, and seeing if anything pops up as an aberration. Then if you’re setting up actually for doing a field audit, you need to also be auditing in the office for all the backroom procedures, etc. Are we doing our processes right in the office?

Then when you finally get this thing to the field, you need to interview everybody involved. When I say everybody involved, you need to ask the technicians, “Would you recognize any problems out there that somehow haven’t been taken care of?” Just like you said, sometimes things are known issues that never get resolved due to money, basically.

Sometimes, like I said, I run a lot of outside audits, go to the technicians and find out that, “Yeah, we knew about this problem,” and maybe they went to their immediate supervisor, which agreed with them, and went to his supervisor, and eventually, nothing happens.

The technician, let’s say, has a problem. They can either live with whatever’s going on there, or they can take that quantum leak and go to the VP of production, or whatever, and take your actual career in your own hands when you do that because it’s usually not a real popular move to go way over your supervisor and their supervisors’ heads.

Weldon: Yep, I agree with that. John, one of the things you pointed out there, let’s loop back around it for just a second. I call what you just discussed the known but not addressed versus the known but not known. Those interviews, as you were calling folks in the field, that’s one of those very early steps when we start to do a loss and unaccounted investigation.

I always found in my career that I wanted to have those discussions before we ever got to that point. I always made it at least a weekly level on the individual operating areas, and then summing up those into the back office to have those conversations.

You and I both know, we’ve seen this so many times, there’s a problem out there that’s known. The technicians identified it. As you said, he’s running up the food chain, but management decides it’s too big to fix. We get problems that just exist out there because, as a company, we’re not willing to address them.

From a measurement standpoint, we need to identify that. We need to flag it. We need to engrave it on the wall in the front of the building, “We know that this pipeline segment has X problems,” so that we can always identify it.

The other one, and probably the worst one to me, is what I call the known but not known problem. We’ve identified something in the field, and it might not be a measurement issue. It may be that we had a big line that went down.

We had either plan maintenance on a big section of line, big line segment, or maybe we had a leak, maybe we had a compressor down, whatever the reason, maybe we blew down a big piece of line, and then had to do repairs, purge it, and then repressurize it. Maybe there was a known hole in that line. Maybe we blew gas for four or five days till we got it repaired.

Sometimes the problem is so big in the field that the measurement tech, the operations guys, they just always assume, “Everybody knows this happens.” But we missed that little piece of transferring that information to the back office people so they can record those estimates.

That known but not known is, like I call it, we’ve got to make sure when you do those interviews, that’s when you find out from the field, “John, you know we had that big leak last month?” You go, “Well, wait a minute. Nobody reported that to me.” That, in itself, could identify a lot of problems, can’t it?

John: Absolutely. The communication between the field and the office, and sometimes the field operations people versus the technicians is a drop spot. Sometimes it’s the technicians and the office personnel have a missing link. That’s a very important link because your communication is key to exactly what we were talking about.

I remember some years ago, I’m looking at balances, and this is back in the dawn of computerized flow measurement where the company I was working for, which is now a part of enterprise, we had about half chart recorders still and half electronics. We had to wait till the end of the month to get all the real numbers in.

We come up with a hundred million loss on this one lining segment. I was able to go back in our measurement system and look at the dailies after all the monthlies came in. I’m looking at the dailies, and it’s rocking long.

You expect some line pack differences during the days, and everything’s rocking long, couple of million short, couple of million long. Everything’s fine. One day, lost a hundred million. One day.

Then it all went back to normal. That’s when I started making calls to the field. It’s like, “What happened on so and so a day last month?” Then there was a little bit of silence and it’s like, “Well, we forgot to mention that we moved a hundred million off the system, basically unmeasured. We moved a bunch of gas off the system, unmeasured.”

It’s like, “OK, now I know where to look for it,” but it caused a little bit of a heart palpitation for a minute there. This is one of the things that could have been avoided by proper communications.

Weldon: I agree 100 percent, John. Once we’ve made those calls out in the field, once we’ve made the rounds of calling operations, calling the measurement folks, and we think we’ve covered those bases, where’s the next place we start to do? What’s next on John’s checklist?

John: You have to make a few assumptions. One assumption is you’re going to find issues throughout the entire program, and you will. Balancing systems, processes, procedures, technical skills, equipment being used, station room designs, how it operated, etc. Your methodology and program must be all-inclusive.

You can’t just pick one thing out, and we’re going to concentrate on this, unless you have a known smoking gun, which is very seldom. Most of the time, in these audits, especially if it’s an overall audit to try to improve the process, you find problems, issues everywhere throughout.

You talk to the technicians in the field, and they’re going, “If that office staff could keep everything straight, we wouldn’t have problems.” You talk to the office staff and they say, “If these people would send us our test reports and not have conflicting information on them,” on, and on, and on, “we wouldn’t have these problems.”

You find that there are issues that are pretty encompassing and all parties sometimes have a little bit of an issue, and try to correct those.

Weldon: That old adage, death by 1000 cuts. Like you said, sometimes there are big smoking guns, but I’ve seen the same thing that you’re talking about in audits. We get out there and we just find lots and lots of little stuff, right?

John: Absolutely, and sometimes it’s really small things that have large consequences, and sometimes, depending on your flows, etc., it may not be a big deal. It can be as simple as someone changed an RTD on a recorder and they didn’t get the RTD tip all the way down into the probe.

Gee, that can create all sorts of issues. I found one in California that was 19 degrees off just due to the fact that the probe tip was not actually into the gas stream, which was almost two percent on a pretty good-sized station.

Weldon: For the folks that take some of the classes that I teach, they’re pretty used to hearing me rant and rave about temperature. Temperature is one of our biggest deficits in our industry.

We don’t measure it well, and the little things like what you’re talking about, RTD tips not on the bottom of the thermal wells, no conductive fluid in there. The one I love, Charlie, is the 14-inch RTD that’s inserted into an inch-and-three-quarter thermal well and a 2-inch or a 3-inch pipe, and there’s a foot of it sticking up there in the sun.

The thing I always like to say in my classes is everybody that grills has that favorite big, stainless steel spatula for flipping those burgers. That favorite stainless steel fork for flipping those steaks.

If you leave that stainless steel fork or that stainless steel spatula, if you leave the end of that over the fire when you reach up and next and grab it next time, is it uncomfortable, Charlie? Is it warm?

John: The what?

Weldon: Yeah. Anyway, I digress.

John: You are correct. Just because it’s heating at the very tip of it doesn’t mean it’s not going to be warm on the other end.

Weldon: Right. I got you sidetracked there. As we start marching through these problems in the field, I’m assuming that you probably have a specific order you look at in audits. Before we ever get to the audit, when companies just start to look at the problems, what are some of the things that are the first off?

Before you invoke the audit word and springing outside people to help you, what are the first things that companies should be looking for as they try to track down problems?

John: For one thing, they should be looking to make sure that all the information in their measurement system is correct. All the inlets are inlets. All the outlets are outlets. That sounds pretty basic.

However, that can cause big problems that actually aren’t there, but they’re perceived problems. You can have literally a Chinese fire drill trying to find a big issue and find out that a big cell station has been turned somehow into a big receipt station, and that will create all kinds of issues.

You need to make sure all your information is correct. Everything fits in the right zone. Everything that’s an inlet is an inlet. Everything that’s an outlet is an outlet. That’s how you’re going to start to assess it.

Now, if you want to talk about we’ve ascertained that there is a problem and it’s a problem that needs to be corrected, and we start to go to the field, we have to coordinate that. You can’t just say, “Tomorrow we’re going to the field and we’re going to do all this third-party work,” etc. You have to plan it. You have to say, “What stations are we going to look at?”

At least for the big stations, you do take a look at the big stations first, because the old 80-20 rule, 80 percent of your flow is going through 20 percent of your stations. I would suggest looking at your outlets first just to make sure that your measurement is correct on your outlets.

Also, in one of those types that likes to have separate meter runs as a check on outlets, I like to have a piggyback style recorder on the outlet meter and then a complete station in front of it that is our check meter independently. You may ask, why I do that, or why say that that is a good thing to do?

Because, let’s say, on any kind of a meter, whether it be orifice, ultrasonic, turbine, whatever, if you’re hooked up on a piggyback style just taking a signal off of that particular set of taps or whatever, anything that happens inside that meter, you’re going to record the same values generally that the other recorder, that is, the main recorder, is actually seeing.

Whereas, if you have separate measurement, you may end up with a [indecipherable 24:12] delta process and go, “Wait a minute. Something’s going on. Our recorders on the outlet meter do agree.” However, that’s all we’re checking, is recorder against recorder. We’re not checking any other measurement specifications here.

Weldon: That’s an important part there also, John. I’ve seen this too often where companies, someone has told them, maybe at the audit level, internally within their company, maybe the measurement director, maybe they got an engineer that says, “We need ‘check measurement,'” and that check measurement gets thrown up in air quotes.

“Wait a minute. Installing our own hardware and installing our own equipment and maintaining it, that’s expensive. We’re just going to put a transmitter or flow computer on the opposite taps of the custody parties meter.”

You’re exactly right. If we have that data coming into the office, when the office gets it, the office may not know, is that a standalone meter or is it really just piggybacked off of the custody party’s meter?

Having true check measurement instead of just repeating the information from the other company’s device, that gets to be a critical piece. First of all, we want to try to get real check measurement. A separate primary device, right?

John: Absolutely.

Weldon: If we don’t have one, that’s got to be identified in your balance documents, it’s got to be identified in your measurement system so people realize, “I see this called a check meter, but we’re only verifying the transmitters work.”

John: Absolutely. That’s always been a pet peeve because we’re operating with information that may or may not be correct.

I’ve often many, many times found that if we have an actual, literal check meter plus being able to piggyback off the other outside, third-party company’s meter, we have several sets of information to pick and choose from to say, “Wait a minute. Something’s going on. We need to go check it out.”

By the way, I will offer a little bit of advice. If you think that there’s a problem between your check meter and the outside third-party meter, before you start calling names or saying you guys are messing with us here, go check your equipment out thoroughly first before you ever make that call.

Weldon: Absolutely. Get your own house in order, right?

John: Absolutely, because if you don’t about, the third time that the third party gets called out on something that’s obviously not their issue, the next time you call on something that may really be their issue, they’re a little reluctant to even give you the time of day.

Weldon: Related to that, slightly different but related to it, John, is that when you think that there’s a problem with the other party’s meter, and maybe you’ve already gone through the process of double-checking your equipment, you’re confident your numbers are right, when you go to that other party and say, “Hey, I think we have an issue,” do it civilly.

Go back and say, “Hey, can we get your guy out and can we do another witness test when we check this?” All too often in our industry, because it sounds cool, especially to the third parties that we contract out with, they love to throw the audit word around, don’t they?

John: Yes, and that’s overused.

Weldon: Yes. If I’ve got a big interconnect with another party, and we may be moving a lot of gas, hundreds of thousands of million dollars worth of gas a day through it, that’s very possible, right?

John: Absolutely.

Weldon: The thing is, start civilly. Many times, the word audit is contractually defined.

John: Absolutely. You have certain rights.

Weldon: A measurement analyst or a guy in the field calls, “We need to get an audit done on this,” because they’ve heard that word. It sounds cool.

Are you using a third-party measurement contractor for your check measurement and that measurement contractor says, “Hey, there’s discrepancy with the other party. I sent him an audit letter”? That puts people on the defensive right away.

John: Absolutely. My approach was always to get a hold of the measurement boss of the other side, whatever the other side might be, and lay out the issue. Be very straight upfront and honest about it. That’s one of the things I’ve always enjoyed about measurement, is the ethics of all the companies involved.

I’ve actually worked on an audit and had a huge issue, multi-million-dollar issue that was found, and the guy that had to make the adjustment call me a month later and said, “Hey, I want you to audit another line for me.” I said, “You realize that you just made a multi-million dollar adjustment on something I just found.”

He says, “Oh, yeah. It was correct. We figured it out. Now, I want you to do some work for us.” Fair enough. Ethics, ethics, ethics. If you lose your reputation in this business, you’ve lost everything.

Weldon: Yep, and that’s something we can’t overemphasize. When I teach class, I’m sure you hear the same thing. You’re in doing a measurement class, and you start talking about the different problems we could have. We have an orifice meter. What happens if?

The question people always want to know, does that make it high or does that make it low? Are we over-reporting or under-reporting volumes? That should never be the question we ask in measurement. We should ask, “Are we doing it right? If we’re not doing it right, how do we fix it?” It’s not, whose favorites in, right?

John: Oh, I agree. It certainly doesn’t matter are we buying or selling. I’ve actually heard that. It’s like that doesn’t make any difference. Our job, our purpose in life, is to get this correct.

Even when you have a witness-type meter test, some people consider that adversarial. That should not be adversarial. It’s just I’m representing my company, you’re representing your company, and we’re counting the cash register. It doesn’t need to be adversarial. However, sometimes you must be firm, yet polite, when getting things done.

It’s like, “Hey, we don’t need to look at that orifice plate. It was OK last six months we looked at it.” I said, “No, we need to look at that.” Sometimes you have to be a little assertive about things like that.

Weldon: I like firm but polite. Maybe I’ve been a little lacking on that sometime over the years.

[laughter]

John: If it’s the same as when you come home, it’s like you need to tone it down because you’re not out working with the folks in the field anymore. I understand that.

Weldon: We’ve gone over some pretty good stuff here, John. We’ve helped people understand how do we get to the point we know we have a problem. How do we begin to address that? Anything you want to add here in the last couple of minutes before we let folks go back to their regular schedule programming?

John: One of the things that does always come to mind to me is the measurement technicians that look at, say, a meter run, and they feel like their responsibility is one end of the flange upstream and into this flange downstream, and that’s all there is to measurement. You need to be looking at the whole facility, seeing if there’s any issues.

Look for things like a frozen dump valve. I’ve actually been on locations where we’re looking for measurement issues, drive up and the thief hatches on these tanks are flopping up and down. Then you look over and look at a separator and realize the outlet of that separator is a solid sheet of ice.

It’s leaking, and all your production is going through the tanks, so it’s lost. It’s been measured somewhere, but you get to this big facility and it just disappears. That is definitely lost and unaccountable, and that unaccountable is really hard to quantify.

Weldon: That’s a great point, John. Our good friend, Dean [Graves…

John: Good man.

Weldon: …in his measurement classes, he had a couple of slides that I’ve stolen and I use in my classes. It was where he went back and did a lot of data compiling.

The numbers he came up with is that when we talked about measurement issues in the broadest sense, measurement issues, when he looked at what was the magnitude of the problems caused by calibration errors — transmitters that needed to be calibrated, bad temperatures — that was the smallest of all the errors that measurement had.

Much larger than that were, “We didn’t operate our measurement properly. We had a plate in backwards. We had the wrong size plate entered in the flow computer. We had other configuration items wrong in the flow computer. We had balances where we showed something as a receipt instead of delivery.”

Those issues were three to four times larger in magnitude. I don’t remember the exact numbers. Don’t have the slide in front of me, but they were three to four times larger in magnitude than the actual transmitter calibration issues.

The largest single piece of measurement problems were caused by things upstream of the primary device, of how the system was being operated, things like what you’re talking about there, stuck dump valves, liquid in the system, pulsation, lots of issues there.

John: Absolutely. Expanding a little bit on what you just said, one of the past backroom guys on one of the major pipeline systems told me one time, he says, “You know, John, I have made some minor adjustments on a bad plate size unless it’s gone too long.”

He said that the major things that have been million-dollar adjustments have literally been configuration issues where somebody did make a plate change, maybe a big plate change, and forgot to put in their flow computer, forgot to report it, whatever, come back and find it later in six months, a year later. It’s a big issue. Your configuration is very, very important.

Weldon: Great point. It’s getting close to the point that we need to let folks go. I appreciate you doing this, John. It’s been a great discussion. I think people will bring some things back from it.

I’d just like to point out that if you all are going to be at ASGMT, which is starting on the 16th, actually the 17th through 19th of September, John has a couple presentations going there. He’ll be talking in detail about loss and unaccountable investigations.

John: Yes, I do. The problem is this is a much larger subject than we can even think about covering at this point, but it’s very interesting. Let me just say something to some of the young measurement technicians out there.

If you’re interested in what you’re doing, you are going to be really, really good. If you’re just going through the motions, you’re going to be able to stay there but not be really effective.

Weldon: I think that’s great, John. We’re always short of new, fired-up blood in our industry. John, thanks for being on. We appreciate it, sir.

John: Hey, thank you very much. Like I say, I appreciate you inviting me. It’s been an honor, Weldon.

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Weldon: I want to thank each and every one of you for listening to our podcast. I hope you found this episode both interesting and informative. If you did, please share our podcast with your coworkers, your boss, and others in the industry. We’ll have a full transcript of this episode and John’s contact info in our show notes on the website, pipelinepodcastnetwork.com.

As always, if you have comments or questions about the episode, suggestions for future topics, or if you’d just like to offer yourself up to the podcast microphone as a guest, then send me a message on LinkedIn, or shoot me an email at weldon.wright@fpvprime.com.