Southwestern Petroleum Short Course Paper: Turning Vapor Recovery from Liability to Asset

Platinum Control is pleased to announce that our team will be presenting new research on improving vapor recovery performance at the upcoming Southwestern Petroleum Short Course being held April 20-23, 2026.

In the technical presentation titled “Solving the VRU Problem: Turning Vapor Recovery from Liability to Asset,” Platinum Control’s Michael Chavez (Vice President of Growth), and Brandon Dyck (Director of Engineering), will examine why Vapor Recovery Units (VRUs) have historically struggled to deliver consistent performance, and how a modern, data-driven engineering approach can fundamentally change the economics and reliability of vapor recovery.

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Michael Chavez, Vice President of Growth, will be onsite meeting with operators and industry partners interested in maximizing profitability by monetizing valuable BTU-rich tank vapor gas while reducing tank flaring and emissions.

Meetings can be scheduled in advance – contact us to reserve time. 

Why VRUs Have Struggled to Deliver

For decades, VRUs have largely been treated as compliance equipment rather than engineered production assets. In many installations, systems have been:

• Sized using rough estimates of vapor load

• Lightly engineered for highly dynamic operating conditions

• Deployed with minimal instrumentation or operational monitoring

The result has been a pattern many operators know well: inconsistent runtime, frequent cycling, loading instability, and escalating maintenance costs. These issues have reinforced the industry perception that VRUs simply “don’t work,” even though the underlying problem is often how they are engineered, deployed, and managed.

Platinum Control’s research challenges that legacy assumption.

A New Engineering Framework for Vapor Recovery

The upcoming presentation outlines a next-generation approach to VRU deployment built around three key principles:

1. Precise system sizing based on real vapor load behavior

2. Comprehensive operational measurement across critical parameters

3. Flexible deployment strategies designed to accommodate dynamic vapor generation

Rather than relying on a limited set of indicators, Platinum Control’s approach captures a comprehensive operational dataset providing operators with a significantly improved picture of VRU performance and well site dynamics.

The course will focus on:

• Moving from reactive maintenance to predictive operations

• Supporting the future of methane measurement

• Discussion of field results from the Permian Basin

• Turning vapor recovery into a high-value asset

By accurately matching equipment capacity to real vapor loads, the approach helps operators avoid both oversized systems and vapor-constrained installations – two common causes of VRU underperformance.

Join the Discussion at SWPSC

Attendees will gain a practical understanding of how a modern VRU program can:

• Improve operational reliability

• Reduce maintenance costs

• Support methane compliance strategies

• Increase the economic return of vapor recovery systems

If you’re attending the conference, we invite you to join the session and learn how solving the long-standing VRU problem can turn vapor recovery from a liability into a measurable, high-value asset.

About SWPSC

The Southwestern Petroleum Short Course Association, Inc., (SWPSC) describes itself as a non-profit education organization blending the talents of the Texas Tech University petroleum engineering faculty and petroleum production experts from all over. The purpose of the SWPSC is to disseminate advance technology with emphasis on application and solving engineering problems through its annual conferences and workshops.

More information is available on the Southwestern Petroleum Short Course website.

Contact

Michael Chavez Vice President of Growth Platinum Control mchavez@platinumcontrol.com