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by closewith 701 days ago
To 1% volume, like rotary meters, but not 1% mass. At least not at reasonable cost.

But you are right that regulation is the answer, although personally I think direct leak detection is more realistic than measuring gas flows accurately in a system that's already built around low accuracy metering.

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Coriolis flow meters in natural gas have been accurate and pretty inexpensive since the 1990s with accuracies better than 99% on the extreme low end and 99.5% on the high end.

Its easy to say that anything is 'too expensive' when the regulatory bar is set so low that it doesn't exist.

Right, you could put a combustible-gas-safe mass flow sensor on every gas line, high and low pressure, at a cost of roughly 100x current rotary and aperture flow meters, but then metering would become by far the largest cost in gas production.
Nope, Ex rated coriolis flowmeters are barely $150k.
A residential rotary gas meter costs less than €15, and that's the long tail you need to replace to measure losses accurately.

Edit: And current turbine and aperture flow meters cost hundreds.

Ok...I don't think everyone here is saying you should put a Coriolis meter on every single residential service. That would be insane.
This thread is in response to a user who commented above:

> Even if not every pope is metered, at the very least there should be metering at the point of bulk purchase (eg. from a LNG ship) to the end user (gas meter at a home).