China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC)

History

2021: Smart Oil Platform Launch

On October 14, 2021, China's first offshore smart oil field at Qinhuangdao 32-6 went into operation, its operator China National Offshore Oil (CNOO) said. The smart offshore field will help make the country's offshore oil and gas production more digital and intelligent by applying technologies including cloud computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), big data and artificial intelligence ( AI), said CNOO, China's largest offshore oil company.

The Qinhuangdao 32-6 oil field is located north of the Bay of Bohai with an average water depth of about 20 meters. Technologies also enable real-time monitoring, forecasting, and diagnostics, remote control, integrated sharing, and coordinated operations to help make decisions to improve production efficiency in offshore oil and gas fields.

The first smart oil platform has begun work in China

The applied technologies can increase production efficiency at the Qinhuangdao field by 32-6 by 30% and reduce operating costs by 5-10% while ensuring production growth, said Project CEO Yang Lin.

According to one analyst, production costs are expected to gradually decrease, as more high-tech personnel will work at the oil fields, and the digitalization of offshore fields will also contribute to the high-quality development of the Chinese oil and gas sector.

As China's energy exploration shifts toward deep-water and deep-water sectors of unconventional oil and gas, oil and gas production conditions are more difficult than ever, making their exploration more difficult. This is a reasonable step for oil and gas companies to use technologies such as IoT, big data and AI to make offshore oil and gas production in the country more digital and intelligent, while increasing the operational efficiency of offshore fields, said Luo Zuoxian, head of exploration and research at the Sinopec Institute of Economics and Development.

CNOO said it has installed more than 400 digital cameras and 26,000 automatic data collection points on the oil production platform, which not only monitors operations, but also monitors all equipment and collects production data to ensure joint production at various gas fields.^[1]

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