Producing oil and gas from a federal lease is only half of what the government wants accounted for; the other half is where every produced volume went. The disposition part of the Oil and Gas Operations Report, known as OGOR-B, is that accounting. It takes the month's production and inventory and requires the operator to assign every barrel and every Mcf to a disposition: sold to a purchaser, flared, vented, consumed as lease fuel, lost, or carried forward in inventory. The disposition report is a closed balance, meaning opening inventory plus production has to equal dispositions plus closing inventory, with nothing unexplained. Making that balance close each month is a field-data problem: the tank gauges, LACT meters, and flare meters have to agree well enough that the accounting zeroes out. This page explains how disposition is tracked, the codes it uses, and why the measuring instruments are what make the report balance.
OGOR disposition report in one line: The OGOR disposition report, OGOR-B, is the part of the federal Oil and Gas Operations Report that accounts for where a lease's produced volumes went during the month, assigning every barrel and Mcf a disposition such as sold, flared, vented, used as lease fuel, or held in inventory, using defined disposition codes. It is a closed balance: opening inventory plus production must equal total dispositions plus closing inventory. Making that balance close depends on tank gauges, LACT meters, and flare meters reconciling to each other.
The disposition report treats production as something that must be fully accounted for rather than simply reported. Whatever a lease produces in a month either leaves the lease, is consumed on it, is lost, or remains in a tank at month-end, and OGOR-B requires each of those outcomes to be quantified. The governing identity is a balance: the volume in inventory at the start of the month plus the volume produced during the month must equal the volume disposed of during the month plus the volume in inventory at its end. If the two sides do not match, the report does not balance and something in the accounting is wrong.
The dispositions themselves are captured with defined codes so that the government can categorize where volumes went consistently across operators. Oil dispositions include sold, used on the lease, and other categories, while gas dispositions distinguish sold gas from flared, vented, and lease-fuel gas, among others. Each disposition category has its own code, and every volume that leaves the produced stream has to be tagged with the code that describes its fate. This coding is what lets the government see, in aggregate, how much of the nation's federal-lease gas is sold versus flared or vented.
The discipline this imposes is that nothing can be ignored. Gas burned as lease fuel to run a compressor is not sold, but it was produced, so it has to be reported as lease-fuel disposition. Gas flared during an upset was produced and has to be reported as flared. Oil left in a tank at month-end is neither sold nor lost; it is inventory carried forward. The operator cannot make the report balance by leaving out the awkward categories, because leaving them out is precisely what breaks the balance and what an auditor looks for.
Opening and closing inventory are the pivots the whole balance turns on, particularly for oil, where production accumulates in tanks and is removed in truck loads or through a LACT unit that may not align with the calendar month. The oil produced in a month rarely equals the oil sold in that same month, because some sits in the tank across the month boundary. The opening inventory, the closing inventory, and the sales during the month all have to be captured accurately, or the balance will not close even when nothing is actually missing; the volume is simply in the tank rather than in a disposition.
This is why tank gauging is central to the disposition report. The closing inventory of one month is the opening inventory of the next, so a gauging error propagates forward and shows up as a persistent imbalance until it is found. A tank gauged accurately at month-end, whether by a manual gauge or an automated tank level measurement, anchors both the closing balance of the month ending and the opening balance of the month beginning, keeping the running inventory honest. When gauges drift or are read carelessly, the disposition report develops phantom imbalances that take real effort to chase down.
The disposition codes turn the balance into a categorized accounting rather than a single figure, and getting the codes right matters as much as getting the totals right. Volume reported under the wrong disposition code, such as lease fuel reported as sold or vented gas reported as flared, may keep the arithmetic balanced while misstating what actually happened, and those miscodings have downstream consequences for royalty and for emissions accounting. The report balancing is necessary but not sufficient; the volumes also have to carry the codes that truthfully describe their disposition.
The disposition report balances only when the field instruments that measure each disposition agree with one another and with production. The LACT meter or the run tickets measure oil sold. The tank gauges measure inventory. The flare meter measures gas flared. The fuel meter measures lease-use gas. Each of these is an independent measurement, and the disposition balance is essentially a cross-check that they are collectively consistent with what was produced. A gap in the balance is a signal that one of these measurements is off, missing, or being estimated rather than read.
Reconciling them monthly by hand is tedious and error-prone when the readings live in different places: gauge sheets in the field, LACT tickets from the purchaser, flare estimates from a spreadsheet. The operator ends up chasing an imbalance across systems that were never designed to agree, and the temptation is to force the balance with a plug figure rather than to find the real error. A plugged balance passes the arithmetic test but leaves the operator exposed, because the plug is exactly the kind of unexplained volume an audit surfaces.
Bringing the measurements together is what makes the reconciliation reliable. Where a cloud SCADA platform such as Merobix trends tank levels continuously, captures LACT totalizer readings, and logs flare and fuel meter volumes in one place, the disposition balance can be assembled from measurements that are already aligned in time and traceable to their instruments. An imbalance points to a specific meter or gauge rather than to a vague discrepancy, so the operator fixes the measurement instead of plugging the report. Continuous tank-level and meter data also mean the month-end inventory is a reading rather than a scramble, which is where most disposition imbalances originate. The result is a disposition report that balances because the underlying volumes genuinely reconcile, not because the arithmetic was forced to.
OGOR-B is a closed accounting where opening inventory plus production during the month must equal total dispositions plus closing inventory. Every produced barrel and Mcf has to be assigned a disposition such as sold, flared, vented, used as lease fuel, or carried forward as inventory. If the two sides of the balance do not match, the report does not balance and something in the measurement or accounting is wrong.
Because oil accumulates in tanks and is sold in loads that rarely align with the calendar month, opening and closing inventory are the pivots the disposition balance turns on. A tank gauged accurately at month-end anchors both the closing balance of one month and the opening balance of the next, so a gauging error propagates forward as a persistent imbalance until it is found. Accurate tank levels keep the running inventory honest and prevent phantom imbalances.
Usually it is a measurement that is missing, drifting, or estimated rather than read: an inaccurate tank gauge, a flare volume that was guessed, unmetered lease fuel, or a LACT reading that does not reconcile with sales. Because the report is a closed balance across several independent instruments, any one of them being off shows up as an unexplained gap. Reconciling the tank gauges, LACT meters, and flare meters against production is what closes the balance honestly.
Merobix reads your field devices into a cloud SCADA - the real thing behind these terms, live in days from any browser.