Metering the Energy Boom

There’s no doubt about it- the North American oil and gas industry has been booming over the past year. As technology advances, it has become possible to discover large new fossil fuel deposits and extract them from places previously thought unreachable. This is especially true of the vast shale formations across the country, namely the Eagle Ford, Barnett, Bakken, and Marcellus shale plays, among many others. The Bakken formation, which lies underneath parts of North Dakota, Montana, and Saskatchewan, has been very popular recently as it was discovered to hold vast quantities of shale oil and natural gas with estimates in the billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas.

With all of the potentially recoverable oil and gas out there, state of the art equipment is necessary to handle the mass quantities of fossil fuel. In June alone, North Dakota produced an average of 800,000 barrels of oil a day. Metering skids, pumping skids, gas separation skids, and Lease Automatic Custody Transfer (LACT) Units are a crucial part of this process. It is one thing to have the technology to get the oil and gas out of the ground, but quite another to be able to monitor, process, and transfer all of it from the
production site to trucks, pipelines, or storage tanks. When hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil are being produced per day, no one can afford an error, which is why reliable valves and equipment are so crucial.

DFT® Model WLC® Wafer Style Check Valves and Basic-Check® Valves can help ensure precision in these situations. Accurate results are simply a must, for the company delivering the oil and gas as well as the company receiving it. A typical custody transfer skid could include multiple meters and meter provers to ensure exactness.