Is there any interest in knowing the total daily flow rate of the well site vent flare?

I believe that there will come the day when environmental agencies like the EPA and state agencies will mandate reporting of vent flare gas at well head sites.  Think about it, there are thousands of wellhead flares throughout the USA in the shale areas like Marcellus, Bakken, Eagle Ford, etc.  The VOC's exiting those flares are not what you would call negligible in toxicity levels, and the time will come soon that the flares will require a flow rate measurement at the inlet to the flares and after the knockout drums. 

My question is, who sees this regulation coming, or who has seen this regulation already happening in their area?

Tags: flares, gas, vent, wellhead

Views: 622

Replies to This Discussion

Jerry, 

    I work for a company that has been doing this several years, there's a lot of competition in the business. Most flare gas is measure by an OFU or single chamber meter tube before the flare. 

What technology principle is this OFU or single chamber meter tube?  Are you speaking about the flow measurement of vent gas, right? 

Jerry, what's the different between your flow meter and the ones I see available from many other sources? 

Max,

Thanks for the question.  Our flow meter design  incorporates a complete electronics package with measurement of the instantaneous mass flow rate as well as the totalized mass flow rate over a configurable period of time.  In most of the installations at the well head vent flares stacks, our flow meter single piece construction probe is inserted into the flare line via an NPT thread on our probe and a half coupling welded on the flare line.  The electronics mounts atop the probe, and then our totalizer module can be attached to the one conduit entry or remotely mounted.  Our flow meter can reliably measure the mass flow rate with being affected by low pressure drops, as well as provide a wide dynamic flow rate rangeability with a high turn down ratio.  So measurement from low velocities 0.5 to 2 to 5 feet per second under normal conditions to 100+ feet per second under upset conditions are done easily.  Our flow meter technology can also deal with the varying gas composition at the vent gas flare line.  The other beauty of this flow measurement is that it only needs one single entry for measurement and does it with one technology.  We can offer simple 120 VAC powered design with the wiring of the output signal to the well site PLC or SCADA system OR we can offer for remote well sites with 24VDC power or less, a solar panel design with a wireless RTU that send the output flow data back wirelessly to the data acquisition SCADA system.  It's a nice clean, professional package that ranges from $3050 to $4825 depending upon if there is the solar panel involved. 

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