Computation of Natural Gas Flow Rate using a Spreadsheet

Natural gas is fast becoming a major primary source of fuel in Nigeria and is normally piped to the end users. The flow rate is measured with the orifice meter. The current practice is to manually read the sales line pressure and temperature, differential pressure and static pressure. These data are then used to compute manually the flow rates using necessary conversion factors. The primary objective of this work is to develop a Microsoft Excel 2000 template for computing the flow rates of natural gas in pipelines.The data collected from one of the gas stations in the Niger Delta Area for a period of six months in 1999 were used to validate the template. The com-puted flow rates are then compared with the manually calculated flow rates. It is found that the ratio of the computed to calculated flow rates is 1.00 ± 0.02 for most of the days; the range was 0.80 - 1.10. The lowest values occurred af-ter the gas supply was disrupted for two days.