The measurement is the invoice.
Everywhere else on a site, a bad reading costs you an investigation. At a meter run it costs you the difference, on every barrel, until somebody notices. Midstream is the business where instrumentation error is denominated in money.
What a measurement technician is actually reading
- Custody transfer
- The point where title passes and measurement becomes billing. Accuracy here is contractual, not operational
- Meter run
- The metering assembly — meter, straightening, temperature and pressure transmitters, densitometer — whose combined uncertainty is the number that matters
- Proving
- Verifying a meter against a known volume. The result is a meter factor, and its drift between provings is the signal worth watching
- Density and API gravity
- What the product actually is. Density error propagates straight into mass and into the invoice
- BS&W
- Basic sediment and water. The contaminant fraction a receipt is discounted for, and an argument nobody wants to have retrospectively
- Meter factor drift
- The trend between provings. A gradual walk is wear; a step is usually something that happened on a date somebody can name
API MPMS, and the measurement your counterparty audits
The API Manual of Petroleum Measurement Standards governs how custody transfer measurement is performed, proved and documented. Your counterparty audits against it, and a measurement dispute is settled on records rather than on recollection.
Indagate holds the meter run as a modelled asset: the meter, its transmitters, its densitometer and its proving history on one record. A meter factor sits on the same timeline as the temperature, pressure and density that produced it, and as the maintenance that touched any of them.
Indagate does not perform custody transfer calculation and is not a flow computer. It models, records and supervises the assets around that measurement. The flow computer remains the authority, as does your measurement procedure.
Six weeks of drift, found at the next proving
A densitometer walks slowly out of calibration. Nothing alarms, because no single reading is out of range — the drift only exists as a shape across weeks. It is found at the next proving, and then the question is how far back it goes and what was invoiced in the meantime.
That shape is exactly what a record kept at collection resolution shows and a rolled-up historian hides. Assess value through measurement disputes opened, time spent reconstructing a period, and provings that produced a surprise.
Configure the platform around your equipment.
Start with a relevant industry pack, then tailor its equipment points, monitoring rules and alerts to your specifications. Combine it with compatible custom models and map checks to the standards and procedures your team works to.
See how industry packs adaptStart with one meter run.
Bring the meter run, its proving history and whatever your SCADA and historian expose. We will model it and show you the drift you already have.