Assessing the Impact of Measurement Uncertainty in Custody Transfer to the Development of Oil & Gas Industry in Tanzania

Abstract

This paper examined the best practise in custody transfer for oil and gas to supporting the development of economy and energy industry, as well as achieving competitiveness in the national and international energy market. The research examined and compared the performance as well as economic efficiently of both manual tank gauging (static tank measurement) and fiscal metering system (dynamic measurement) for oil and gas custody transfer. Tank inventory custody transfer namely Manual Tank Gauging (MTG) and Automatic Tank Gauging (ATG) as well as the Fiscal metering system were all studied. The performances of both tank inventory or tank gauging and fiscal metering system in custody transfer were established by evaluating their respective measurement uncertainty budgets. Both methods were experimentally tested by using field data which were collected from the petroleum products shore tanks and pipeline. Whilst the advantages of fiscal metering system over the imperial manual tank gauging were assessed using measurement uncertainty, and its effect on accounting the accuracy, the product loses the environment and worker’s safety. The results obtained from this study proves that the uses fiscal metering system (FMS) in custody transfer has minimum measurement uncertainty compared to tank gauging, and that FMS has better accuracy five times other than the manual tank gauging (MTG). Therefore, this paper recommends FMS as an effective method in course of transfer of oil and gas from ship to shore tank, from lease tank to ship, from shore tank to rail/road tankers.