The Gazprom Management Committee approved the 2025–2029 Comprehensive Target Program for the Provision of Metrological Support for the Operations and Technological Processes of Gazprom.
The document is designed to further enhance, as well as to ensure the technological development of, the system that monitors the physical-and-chemical properties and volume of gas during its pipeline transmission.
To that end, the Company equips the existing gas metering stations with cutting-edge equipment of Russian make and builds new stations. Starting from 2022, the gas metering stations built by the Company are not conventional multiple-line, but innovative single-line ones equipped with ultrasonic gas flow transducers. As many as 11 stations of the new type are already in operation within the gas transmission system of Gazprom. Under the Target Program, their number is to grow almost twofold by late 2029.
Special attention under the Program is paid to the work of Gazprom’s Metrology Center equipped with the Special National Primary Standard for high-pressure natural gas flow, which is unique to Russia. The facility, which was launched in October 2024, is the country’s first-ever site for the testing, verification and calibration of high-precision devices (flow meters) that measure gas volumetric flow rate during its transmission, both domestic and outbound.
Background
A conventional gas metering station has a multiple-line structure, which means that a gas flow transmitted via a large-diameter trunkline is divided into several flows transmitted through pipes of a smaller diameter which are equipped with their own flow meters, in order for the volume and other physical-and-chemical properties of gas to be measured.
An innovative single-line gas metering station is equipped with an ultrasonic metering complex of a large diameter which is installed directly on the gas trunkline. This solution enables fully automated operation of the gas metering station, reduces its metal consumption, and allows repair and maintenance works to be performed without stopping the transmission of gas. The research work for the development of these innovative gas metering stations won the top Science and Technology Prize of Gazprom in 2022.
Gazprom’s Metrology Center is designed to examine and verify flow meters that work with a wide range of pressures (from 0.1 to 10 MPa). The key component of the Metrology Center is the Special National Primary Standard. It is a unique process unit that, with the highest accuracy, transfers the value corresponding to the standard cubic meter of gas to the metrological unit in order to verify flow meters. All equipment that was used in the creation of the metrology center is of Russian make.
