Title: Impact of International Standards on Manufacturer's of Petroleum Liquid and Gas Flow Measurement Devices by E.L.

Upp

Impact of International Standards on Manufacturer's of Petroleum Liquid and Gas Flow Measurement Devices By E.L. Upp Daniel Industries, Inc. Prepared for Presentation at the Conference on Flow Measurements As Related to National Needs February 26-28, 1974 Gaithersburg, Maryland

INTRODUCTION The U.S. energy business is no longer a domestic industry. Directly, with U.S. companies that operate world wide, and indirectly with the world shortage of petroleum, the energy companies in the U.S. are being forced into worldwide competition for their sources. In this process the measurement of products for custody transfer, taxing purposes and operating data has become entangled in differing practices and equipment from one country to the next; with each country either legally bound to their statutory requirements or by custom to the developed equipment and practices in use. The problems that have occurred to the manufacturers of petroleum liquid and gas flow measurement devices and those we see in the future and some suggested solutions are the thrust of this presentation. In order to lay the groundwork for this discussion, the flow measurement practices in the U.S. will be examined first and then comparisons will be made to the practices in other countries of the world. U.S. PRACTICES The basis for most of the U.S. commercial petroleum measuring equipment in use was founded in theory, but grew up with experience in various standards whether individual company, industry or governmental in origin. These "standards" such as the AGA Gas Measurement Committee Report #3 cover a period of almost 50 years from their origin to their present state. In general, they represent the best knowledge available from industry, manufacturers and some original, governmental input more initially than from the government recently. Similar stories can be told for large positive displacement and liquid turbine meters. In some of the smaller volume meters that have fallen under the various state weights and measures groups more governmental input has been made. So in essence those of us that have been in the wholesale measurement of petroleum fluids gas and liquid have had little or no experience in dealing with governmental agencies and our practices have been basically industry, user and manufacturer developed. This is not an attempt to comment on this practice but is a statement of fact. PRACTICES OF OTHER COUNTRIES However, when we take this approach to petroleum measurement to other countries,

we find that their methods are almost exclusively governmental controlled with little industry and manufacturers input. The standards we have seen have their base on experimental work done some thirty of forty years ago when technology was far from what is available today. The approach of most of these standards has been detailed construction requirements and testing requirements rather than performance standards. The testing requirements given are normally acceptance testing rather than operating tests or maintenance requirements that are found to be so necessary in the U.S. An example of this problem was brought home to me in a presentation I made several years ago at an international meeting in Hungary. I was stating that our gas measurement practices in the U.S. had found it necessary to periodically inspect measuring devices and the approach of governmental initial approval and sealing made no provision for this. I demonstrated the problems found because of operating conditions such as dirt or compressor oil in pipelines, damage to plates or meter runs and the like. Upon completion of the discussion a gentlemen in the audience identified himself from West Germany and he felt that one of the agencies I was referring to was the PTB -- roughly equivalent to our NBS. And he wished that I would take the message across Europe because he was charged with the responsibility of balancing the measurement in a production field with "approved meters" and was being less than successful, but some of the items that had been pointed out would help solve his problem. INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION OF LEGAL METROLOGY In October 1972 the United States ratified the treaty to become a member of the International Organization of Legal Metrology (OIML) and the NBS began work to set up a National Committee for OIML. For those of you not familiar with the OIML, they propose model laws and regulations for consideration by the member states, they recommend uniform international requirements for measuring instruments and they act as a center of documentation and information in legal metrology. It is primarily in the field of establishing standards for weighing and measuring devices as defined by law in government statues throughout the world. As part of the treaty each member state accepts a moral responsibility to adopt any model law which is approved. This immediately introduces a problem in the U.S. since the majority of large volume, large dollar measurements fall outside of the weight and measures jurisdiction and the large volume measurement people have written the industry standards EUROPEAN ECONOMIC COMMUNITY The European Economic Community (EEC) has also set up committees that are promoting their own and not necessarily the same standards as the OIML for flow measurement with the object to make sales of measuring equipment within the Community more readily possible. The U.S. has no official input into this group or standards committee. INTERNATIONAL STANDARDS ORGANIZATION The International Standards Organization (ISO) is a non-governmental organization whose voluntary standards are worked on and agreed to much the same way as the AGA, ASME, API type standards are in the U.S. by the industry, manufacturers and governmental bodies involved in the problem. With this then as a base of where the standards have come from and their thrust, we can examine some of the problems facing the U.S. manufacturers of flow measuring equipment.

MANUFACTURERS PROBLEMS First and most importantly the U.S. Manufacturers are not organized in a manner to present their case effectively to the various agencies listed above. Likewise, tbe petroleum industry has had little effective input into these agencies except in the last year or so and unfortunately this has been of a negative rather than a positive input except in one or two cases. By negative input, I mean that the position has been to oppose or vote against a proposed standard rather than to have worked on the committees involved to have effective and legitimate representation of the U.S. Technology. EXAMPLE CASES A case in point is presented by an October 1973 meeting of an OIML committee on differential pressure gas meters, which I attended as a representative of the AGA. This committee was on its fifth or sixth revision of a proposed standard that had essentially been written by West Germany and represented their practices with a small amount of input from the other countries on the committee, none of whom had done much gas flow measurement. All of the representatives of the various countries were governmental employees except for myself. There was some question as to whether I would be admitted to the meeting since no one outside the governments had ever represented a country in their committee, particularly not an employee of a manufacturer. I was finally admitted with the understanding that I was representing the AGA, but even that was questionable. The meeting consisted of a great deal of editorial work, but little real change to convert a document that was basically one of manufacturing details and acceptance testing to one of performance standards. The document as presently written would be contrary to present metering installations in service in the U.S. and would not allow use of the equipment presently standardized by the industry let alone some new equipment, which is being brought onto the market. Our moral obligation to accept the model law would outlaw our present equipment and methods and more importantly not allow as good measurement as we presently experience. A specific case that occurred during this meeting was the insistence of the German representatives that by pass metering (where a small side stream is assumed to measure proportional to the main stream) be included in the standard since they had once approved such a system. It was no longer a commercially available unit in Germany, but they felt that the device might have merit after further development. The device stayed in the write-up despite disagreement from the United Kingdom, France and the U.S. At the same time, 2-inch orifice meter units that are being used by the hundreds in the United States were being written out of the recommendation. STANDARDS ALREADY WRITTEN Another document that is already an OIML recommendation covering turbine and positive displacement meters was approved prior to the U.S. entry into OIML, but it effectively would require every U.S. manufacturer to redesign each of their meters and derate them to meet specifications which were written around European made meters. We have no "moral obligation" to use this recommendation since the U.S. did not participate in the vote on its acceptance. However, it is obvious that when this comes up for review the U.S. would have to completely change the document or be morally obligated when it was revoted on. This is only one of many of the documents effecting petroleum measurement equipment and practices that would be at least costly if not impossible to confirm to. The countries of the EEC have run into this same problem of trying to get the documents to reflect equipment made in their own countries and this has resulted in little

progress or at best a diluted standard. Unfortunately the problem of technical trade barriers is very real in some areas of the world. As a matter of fact in one country of the world the orifice is an illegal meter, but is still used for the measurement of natural gas in the country. APPROVAL PROCEDURES The so-called approval procedures of the various countries have two effects on the U.S. manufacturers. One is the long delay in receiving approval because of lack of understanding on the part of the manufacturer and the agency. Another problem is the discouragement in making improvements in a meter since relatively minor changes may cause complete new approval or at least a period of delay to determine a new test is not required. This has particularly been true of electronic read-out devices, which have changed completely in the last ten years because of the rapid advancement of the electronic components. In the past this procedure had to be repeated from country to country. Both the OIML and the EEC hope to eliminate the necessity of multiple tests so that one approval will allow use in any of the member countries. So far there has been a great deal of discussion but no agreement on what these tests should include. PERFORMANCE STANDARDS The ISO which is developing their standards as discussed above have been more receptive to the idea of performance documents with the option of use left to the contracting parties on their choice of equipment and methods. It is under these types of standards that the U.S. companies find the most ease in operating, however, even these tend to be restrictive. LIMITATIONS OF TESTING CAPABILITIES Another frustrating problem to both parties is the massive size and capacity of meter stations used in ship loading and unloading. These facilities may have a value of several millions of dollars and weigh many tons. We have found few if any laboratories that could test such units even if the logistics of getting them to a lab could be worked out. To date the majority of these have been sold on any inplace performance test which has some built in problems of what a comparison of these stations to the previous methods of tank gauging really means. The economics of ship loading make the older method less than attractive since this slows the loading time and requires considerably larger storage facilities at the loading ports. Once again we see that the job of flow measurement has many influences beyond the "accurate method" approach of most control agencies. FLOW RESEARCH Another and even more important influence which we see on the horizon is the large amount of research that is presently being conducted in the United Kingdom in particularly but in other parts of Europe as well. To point this out more vividly, Dr. E. A. Spencer of the National Engineering Laboratory in England has recently had budgeted for his lab an amount in excess of $2,000,000 for new equipment. In addition, he has assigned to his measurement section eight research Engineers with their Doctorate degree. Their full efforts are devoted to improvement of flow metering technology. What agencies do we have in the U.S. with even a fraction of the facilities or personnel? In the international area the printed word is the gospel and when you quote from our gospel of the late

20's and early 30's needless to say many investigators are less than impressed with our stories. What research and development work is being done in the U.S. is primarily being done within the user companies and the manufacturers. Regardless of the quality of the work, it is at best suspected to the international makers of standards because of the lack of a recognizable sponsoring agency such as the government or an industry trade organization. This is doubly troubling to us since we are entering the international field late and with relatively old research data. Even worse, the U.S. presents a fragmented statement of position with a number of trade organizations going their separate ways and attempting to influence specific areas of the international standard groups. The U.S. National Committee for OIML is an attempt to coordinate these efforts for OMIL but simultaneous to this other committees are working outside of this group to protect their interest. In particular, the manufacturers have found it necessary to "go it alone" in a number of their dealings with individual countries, since other avenues have been less fruitful. We need a coordinated strong voice in these affairs, but I am less than optimistic that such will the case in the immediate future, which is most critical to our industry. There are stirrings of the need for more cooperation within the U.S. but it is far from an accomplished fact. CONCLUSION In conclusion, the flow measurement of petroleum liquid and gas has become international in scope with the U.S. manufacturers of equipment finding influences on their market that were of no concern previously. As a country we are not organized effectively to present the U.S. technology to the various standards agencies of the world. We are doing little to improve our technology outside of what little the manufacturers and industry are doing. If we are going to influence the future of Petroleum Measurement as we should, a coordinated effort on the part of government agencies, industry, manufacturers of equipment and research must come immediately.