1961 Middle East Reg. Mtg. Dhahran, Mar. 27–29, 1961
The oil industry has been interested for many years in the use of meters for custody transfer and royalty computations rather than by the generally accepted practice of hand gaging of tanks. The reasons for the interest are; the savings of expenditures for installation of tankage, which in turn reduces evaporation losses; provides for more flexible and efficient operations, resulting from increased use of facilities such as tankage, pipelines and ship loading facilities by reducing waiting time necessary for manually taking opening and closing gages; labor savings in those cases where metering can be made automation and unattended. Another reason is the possibility that metering is more accurate than manual tank gaging, which benefits both parties where royalties are involved.
Prior to 1942, research on the accuracy of positive displacement meters was done by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Since then, guidance of research has been a joint venture by ASME and American Petroleum Institute committees. Standard methods were developed for design, research, testing and operation of meter measurement of liquid petroleum hydrocarbons by positive displacement meters. These methods were included in ASIDE publications, National Bureau of Standards Handbooks, the API Standard 1101 and other publications. Because of the need, about the year 1956, high capacity turbine type meters were developed and larger positive displacement meters were built. It is understood that because of the increasing use of turbine meters which are becoming more accurate, the API is changing the name of their "liquid positive displacement committee" to "liquid measurement committee."
