Solutions
Every tank, not just the ones with a transmitter.
Tank monitoring usually means the tanks you instrumented. The rest get a gauge sheet and a clipboard. Here both are the same measurement, carrying different provenance, feeding the same production figure.
Instrumented tanks
Level transmitters report continuously, with the same units and quality discipline as any other tag.
- Level, temperature and any other instrumented point, retained at full resolution.
- A transmitter that stops answering is reported as offline rather than held at its last value.
- Alarm conditions on level, including high-high and rate of change.
Gauged tanks
A pumper records the gauge on a phone and the strapping table does the conversion in software.
- Innage or outage, in feet-inches-eighths or decimal inches.
- Readings outside the strapping table bounds are rejected with an explanation, never extrapolated.
- Works with no signal at the battery and syncs when signal returns.
Both at once, cross-checked
Where a tank has a transmitter and gets manually gauged, the two are compared.
- A drifting transmitter appears as a growing disagreement rather than as silently wrong data.
- Neither reading is discarded — the disagreement itself is the useful signal.
Hauled volumes
A load that left the tank is recorded and carried into the next production calculation.
- Volume alone, or the full run ticket with number, carrier and destination.
- Hauls are attributed to the interval containing their load time, not to when they were entered.
- A haul that would drive production negative is flagged rather than absorbed.
Why the uninstrumented tanks are the interesting ones
Instrumenting a tank is a solved problem, and operators who wanted it have largely done it where the economics worked. What is left is the majority: tanks where a transmitter was never justified, and where the measurement is a person with a gauge tape once a day.
Those tanks produce real barrels and appear in real reports. Treating their measurements as a lesser class of data — entered into a different system, on paper, reconciled by hand — is what puts the operator’s actual production figures in a spreadsheet.
Bringing them into the same pipeline is not about replacing the pumper. It is about the arithmetic happening once, in software, with the strapping table version and the input sources recorded, so the resulting volume can be explained six months later.
Common questions
What does it take to get a tank measuring?
A strapping table for that vessel. Operators supply their own, because a strapping table comes from a physical survey of one specific tank. Until one is loaded, the tank is visible as unmeasurable and gauges can still be recorded against it.
Is oil handled differently from water?
Yes, and the difference is real. Oil and condensate carry temperature and gravity correction — the strapped gauge gives gross observed volume, a volume correction factor brings it to 60 °F, and BS&W is deducted to reach net standard volume. Water is volume change plus hauled volume, with no correction factor.
Does a tank gauge give us production for the wells on that battery?
It gives production for the tank and the battery. A battery commonly serves several wells, and splitting a battery volume between them is an allocation decision. The platform reports at the level the measurement supports.
See it against your own wells.
A demo runs against synthetic data first, then against a read-only connection to your system of record if you want to see real numbers.