New offshore platform taps into potential of heavy-oil reserves in China

BEIJING -- The world's first mobile thermal-injection platform was recently delivered in China's Shandong province, offering new opportunities to tap into China's vast potential for heavy-oil recovery, according to the country's major marine oil-mining company.

China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) announced on Thursday that "Recai No 1" or "Thermal Recovery No 1", the mobile thermal-injection platform developed and built by China, has been delivered in waters off Weihai, Shandong.

The two-deck platform is 82 meters long and 42 meters wide, with a total deck area of over 3,000 square meters, a weight of over 10,000 tonnes and a height equivalent to a building of more than 20 stories.

Equipped with four legs that are over 70 meters high, the platform can operate in waters at the depth of 35 meters, and withstand typhoons up to category 16.

According to CNOOC, the platform features a number of pioneering technologies, including the mobile thermal-injection system and the compensation technology for high-temperature, high-pressure steam pipelines.

It is equipped with three steam boiler systems that can simultaneously inject high-pressure steam at temperatures exceeding 350 degrees Celsius into six oil wells, reducing the viscosity of heavy oil and turning it into more fluid and easily extractable crude oil.

The platform can be towed to different oil-recovery platforms by tugboats to carry out rapid thermal injection, effectively reducing the development costs of heavy oil and realizing large-scale thermal recovery of heavy oil.

Heavy oil refers to crude oil that is relatively viscous and has poor fluidity, making it difficult to extract. Unlike the cold-recovery method used for conventional crude oil, heavy oil is typically developed by thermal recovery.

Heavy oil makes up more than two-thirds of the world's proven crude oil reserves. As one of the world's four major producers of heavy oil, China has an estimated heavy-oil resource volume of about 19.87 billion tonnes. In the Bohai Sea area with which Shandong Province has a coastline, heavy-oil reserves account for nearly half of the total proven crude oil reserves in the area.