A view of the Huizhou 19-6 oilfield in the South China Sea. Photo: Screenshot of CNOOC post
The main structure of Asia’s largest offshore crude oil processing platform, the Huizhou 19-6 platform, reached its highest construction point, or topped out in offshore Zhuhai, South China’s Guangdong Province, on Saturday, according to media reports.
Once completed, the platform will be used for the development and production of a large integrated oilfield with reserves of over 100 million tons in the Pearl River Mouth Basin.
At the Zhuhai Deepwater Equipment Manufacturing Base, the 2,174-ton three-story electrical room module of the Huizhou 19-6 platform was slowly lowered by three large crawler cranes working in coordination and precisely docked with the main platform structure. With this core module installed in place, the main structure of the platform topside was topped out, state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) reported on Saturday, quoting a statement from CNOOC (China National Offshore Oil Corporation).
The Huizhou 19-6 platform is a three-deck, eight-legged crude oil processing platform. Its topside stands approximately 85 meters high—equivalent to the height of a 30-story residential building—with a footprint close to that of 13 standard basketball courts and a designed float-over weight of about 29,000 tons.
To address the characteristics of large offshore engineering equipment, which has a massive scale and numerous modules, the project team achieved extensive onshore integration and innovatively adopted a multi-zone deck assembly and integrated lifting process. This reduced the original 30 deck assembly lifts to just 10, achieving an integrated construction rate of over 90 percent.
After the main structure is topped out, the project will move on to pipeline installation, cable laying, equipment commissioning and other stages. Once completed, the platform will be used for the Huizhou 19-6 oilfield — China’s first discovered large integrated offshore deep-to-ultra-deep clastic rock oilfield with reserves exceeding 100 million tons, providing support for the efficient development of this giant oilfield and national energy supply security.
Last year, CNOOC made a major oilfield discovery at Huizhou 19-6 in the deep and ultra-deep plays of the South China Sea. Through continued exploration, the proved in-place volume of the Huizhou 19-6 oilfield has exceeded 100 million tons of oil equivalent, according to a post on the company’s website.
This discovery has confirmed the largest integrated oilfield in the northern South China Sea in terms of original oil in place, breaking the traditional theoretical understanding, and demonstrating the enormous exploration potential of deep and ultra-deep plays in high-temperature and highly active basins offshore China, the post said.
Global Times
