Coriolis Mass Flow Meters Take Center Stage For Bulk Measurement In Oil And Gas Industry

By Andre Verdone, KROHNE, Inc., business manager, Canada

Accurate measurement of liquids is important for all oil and gas industry production or consumption sites. This is especially true for bulk transfer devices where large volumes of products are being moved and must be monitored, including crude oil depots, gasoline and jet fuel tank farms, refineries, and even cruise line terminals.

In the past, mass transfer was measured in batches with weigh scales or load cells. However installation, calibration, and maintenance of a scale or load cell are costly, difficult to do, time consuming, and don’t work for continuous processes. For these processes, such methods as orifice plates and magnetic flow tubes can measure volumetric flow, but additional instruments are needed to measure temperature and pressure to compensate for fluid density changes. Introducing additional instruments also introduces errors, which can result in an overall measurement error rate as high as three percent.