Abstract
In continuation with the efforts being done to achieve accurate liquid measurement performance at tank farms and to empower the commitment towards protecting the Company’s net worth, high level of accuracy must be achieved when conducting manual and/or automatic measurement of the basic variables required for the determination of the net liquid asset at any time; i.e., level, temperature, density, free water, mass, amongst others. In this line and with the aim of maximizing the overall accuracy of the installed Automatic Tank Gauging (ATG) system by reducing the effects caused by installation and operating conditions, an initiative has been implemented to upgrade the installation and supporting of the still pipe were the ATG is mounted and that of the official manual tank gauging (OMTG) still pipe utilized to verify the accuracy of the ATG. As a result of this initiative, minimal or no vertical movement of the ATG mounting location has been recorded and more stable ATG verification test results are obtained nowadays, enabling the reduction of radar calibrations basically enforced by this mounting movement. This paper will examine the operational problems faced with the design principles considered for the ATG installation on the new and existing storage tanks in KOC and provides recommendations to overcome/minimize the impact of these issues on the liquid measurements process.
