KROHNE Groupe – Nouveautés complètes

Colorado oil and gas producer uses Coriolis flowmeters for wellhead allocation

• Stable post-separator mass flow measurement of crude oil with entrained natural gas
• Replacement of time consuming and costly tank gauging

The Colorado Oil and Gas Producer Bonanza Creek Energy is taking advantage of the Entrained Gas Management (EGM) that ensures both stable and uninterrupted measurements of oil with high gas content. Integrated in OPTIMASS Coriolis flowmeters, the technology provides a cost effective, rugged, and reliable measurement for accurate well allocation information.

Denver-based Bonanza Creek Energy, Inc. is an exploration and production company focused on extracting oil and associated liquids-rich natural gas in Colorado's Denver-Julesburg Basin. The company required an accurate and reliable way to measure how much oil and water each well was producing. Tank gauging is the standard method for these challenging applications, but while simple and relatively accurate, it is time consuming, costly, and entails some safety risks. Bonanza Creek was looking for a cost effective alternative way to provide an accurate oil meter at each wellhead, where the oil flows into a separator that separates the water, gas, and oil. They anticipated there would be gas entrained in the fluid coming out of the separator, so they needed an option that could handle entrained gas.

“We knew the new technology would be the best way for them to handle entrained gas in this application, and the demonstration showed them clearly how the meter could help,” says Bob Phagan, technical sales representative with ICS, KROHNE’s agent in Colorado. “The OPTIMASS meters were installed on the crude oil leg of the oil/water/gas separator, and the customer compared the tank volume versus the metered volume over a 24 hour period and found only minor differences. These differences were due to the phenomenon known as shrinkage. In conclusion, Bonanza Creek found entrained gas management to be huge benefit to their operations.”