Vapor recovery unit (VRU)

Oil storage tanks naturally give off gas vapors as crude sits and settles — light hydrocarbons that would otherwise escape to the atmosphere or get burned off at a flare stack. A vapor recovery unit, or VRU, is a small compressor package built specifically to pull those vapors off the top of the tank, compress them to sales-line pressure, and route them into the gathering system instead of losing them. It's both an environmental control and a revenue play: gas that used to be wasted becomes gas that gets metered and sold.

VRUs have become a bigger part of the compression business as states and the federal government have tightened rules on methane emissions and routine flaring, and operators have realized there's real money sitting on top of every tank battery. A typical VRU package is smaller and simpler than a wellhead or gathering compressor, but it runs constantly and has to handle wet, variable gas without shutting down, which makes reliability and service response just as important as on the bigger units. Guests on the show describe VRUs as one of the clearest wins in the industry — good for compliance, good for the environment, and good for the bottom line.

Inspection technology has changed how operators find candidates for a VRU in the first place: infrared cameras, sometimes called FLIR cameras, can now spot invisible gas leakage or venting at a tank battery well after the obvious sources, like flare stacks and burners, have already been addressed. That kind of leak detection tends to surface a steady stream of smaller opportunities across a producing field, which is part of why demand for vapor recovery units has kept growing even as the more obvious, big-ticket emission sources get cleaned up first.