Critical Review of Wet Gas Definitions

Several definitions of wet gas have been proposed within the Oil and Gas industry. However, in order to choose the best strategy to meter one’s wet gas production, one must have a clear understanding of what wet gas is. So far, efforts appear to have gone awry, with companies deciding how to meter wet gas before defining what it is. This has led to companies employing existing metering solutions and strategies and characterising wet gas as a stream that can be measured with available techniques. The concept of “wet gas metering” can apply to gas condensate fields, high gas-oil ratio (GOR) fields and wet gases. Produced streams of wet gas are metered for a variety of reasons: field economics, reservoir management, allocation issues and metering the produced gas only or metering the liquid and the gas, depending on whether one is selling one phase or both. Depending on the specific requirements, different metering accuracies may be required and different wet gas metering solutions sought. At present, a single definition of wet gas for Oil and Gas applications does not exist (and it may never exist), so a unique metering solution for all types of wet gas may be impossible to achieve. Therefore, a critical approach must be taken to select a wet gas meter for each specific application.