HAIJI ONE, Asia’s first 300-meter deep-water jacket, designed and built independently by China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC), was successfully hauled onto a barge Tuesday, a major breakthrough in the jacket design and a milestone in the construction of a super large offshore oil and gas platform in China.
The jacket completed its construction Monday in Zhuhai in Guangdong on March 1 and is expected to be installed in late March, sources from the company’s Shenzhen branch said.
The jacket will serve the Lufeng 15-1 oil field platform located in the South China Sea. When it is put into operation in September, it will further improve China’s energy supply and guarantee its energy security, according to CNOOC, the operator and the country’s top offshore oil and gas producer.
The 302-meter-tall jacket, close to the height of the Eiffel Tower, weighs 30,000 tons and its base is the equivalent to the size of 26 standard basketball courts.
“For the shipment, we renovated the barge to increase its capacity from 30,000 tons to 38,500 tons and over 200 employees worked nonstop to load the jacket to the ship seven hours ahead of the schedule,” Yang Lianfeng, project manager of the general contractor of the Regional Development Project of Lufeng Oil Field Cluster, said at an interview.
A jacket serves as the offshore oil and gas platform’s foundation, and it is used to support the huge body and tonnage of an offshore platform. It is the most widely used offshore oil and gas development equipment globally.