China’s first “smart factory” for offshore oil, and gas equipment is fully operational
Wire desk byline Sourced from Xinhua, Dawn, Arab News, Anadolu and Minute Mirror. Translated and abridged by the GSRRA Desk.
China’s first intelligent manufacturing base for offshore oil and gas equipment was put into full operation on Wednesday in north China’s Tianjin Municipality.
Covering an area of about 575,000 square meters, this base built along the coast of the Bohai Sea focuses on producing offshore oil and gas platforms and high-end offshore products such as liquefied natural gas modules, according to its constructor China Offshore Oil Engineering Company (COOEC), a subsidiary of the China National Offshore Oil Corporation.
The base consists of four intelligent production workshops, eight production auxiliary centers, 16 final assembly stations and core facilities such as docks facilitating product transportation via large ships. There are also over 600 intelligent production machines at this base.
Compared to the traditional manufacturing process, a series of operations such as material retrieval, pipe coiling, cutting and hydraulic bending can be achieved via a single click through an intelligent manufacturing management platform available at the Tianjin facility.
According to Wang Lei, one of the senior executives of the Tianjin branch of COOEC, there are a variety of offshore oil and gas equipment, and in the past, producing them featured complicated manufacturing processes, and customized and non-standard requirements.
As a result, COOEC opted to develop an intelligent manufacturing management platform to achieve intelligent production under complex conditions, said Wang. “More manufacturing processes are now achieved through the use of equipment, while only a small number of workers are needed to undertake detail adjustment tasks.”
The base was constructed in two phases. The first phase was put into use in June 2022, and 35 offshore oil and gas platforms, with a total weight exceeding 87,000 tonnes, were delivered to countries such as China and Canada.
In the second construction phase of this project, eight final assembly stations and an intelligent pipe production line were added, while the capacity of docks was increased.
“Production efficiency achieved by the intelligent pipe production line has increased by about 20 percent when compared to what was possible in the first phase, and the overall production capacity of the factory has doubled through digital intelligent manufacturing and precise management,” Wang revealed.
In 2023, China’s offshore crude oil production exceeded 62 million tonnes, a year-on-year increase of 3.4 million tonnes—accounting for about 70 percent of the Country’s total crude oil production increase last year.
Reference Link:- https://english.news.cn/20241030/4634fc0d2dce4ebaa2a2f122c26be363/c.html
Zamir Ahmed Awan is the founder and Chair of the Global Silk Route Research Alliance, a think tank in Islamabad. He studied engineering at Shanghai University in the 1980s, and years later he went back to China as Pakistan's science counsellor in Beijing, from 2010 until 2016, working on science and higher education cooperation between the two countries.…
