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Title: EXPLORING THE VARIABILITY BETWEEN METHODS FOR CHARACTERIZING FLASH GAS EMISSIONS FROM OIL STORAGE TANKS
Author: Andrew O. Parker Preston Blackburn
Source: 2018 Natural Gas Sampling Technology Conference
Year Published: 2018
Abstract: Flash gas emissions from storage tanks represent one of the largest single-point sources of fugitive emissions to the atmosphere from the oil and gas industry. Accurate measurement of these flashing emissions is critical to government agencies tasked with monitoring and regulating air quality, yet emissions from the industry are thought to be grossly underestimated. Traditional methods of estimating flash emissions rely on complex equation sets to simulate these vapors after measuring the composition of a hydrocarbon product via a gas chromatograph (GC). New methods that directly measure the flash emissions, either on site or in a laboratory, have been established however, their performance relative to process simulators has not been evaluated directly. To test their performance, a laboratory flash liberation technique has been used to directly measure gas-to-oil ratios (GOR) and the results have been compared to GOR flash emissions calculated using VMG process simulation software across three types of pressurized liquid hydrocarbon test standards: a light-, a mid-, and a heavy-grade condensate. GOR values obtained from the process simulation software underestimated the flashing emissions by 10-50% when compared to the GORs measured from the flash liberation technique for the same sample. The GOR variability from the process simulators may be attributed to the challenges of measuring light-end hydrocarbon components (i.e., C1-C4) due to early vaporization within the heated GC environment, which can lead to larger standard deviations per component between repeat GC injections.

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