By Wang Sun

Working silently for gas hydrate exploitation

By Wang Sun

China has become global first country for obtaining continuous stable gas production in trial exploitation of gas hydrate in sea area and China’s ocean deep-water engineering equipment and technology has made fresh major breakthrough. China’s first ocean deepwater test tank project designed by China Shipbuilding NDRI Engineering Co.,Ltd contributed substantially to this.

Nanhai sea area is the leading distribution area of China’s gas hydrate,nearly 80 billion tons are at the Nanhai sea bed, the trial production point was 203-277m below the water depth 1266m sea bed. However, bad, complex and volatile environment in Nanhai sea area raises very high requirement for performance of deepsea ocean engineering structure, how to accurately acquire movement, load and response data and information of ocean engineering structure in deepsea conditions became a key technology for developing deepsea resources and building deepsea resources development equipment and an important basis for deciding on deepsea resources development equipment structure, design, manufacture,construction and operation scheme. Due to inability to completely simulate actual conditions in theory, the ocean engineering circles unanimously believe results of physical model test based on tank test are most reliable and they are used as final basis for engineering design and construction. For a long time, only a few developed countries for ocean science and technology such as the Netherlands,Norway and the US had ocean deepsea test tanks.

In 2004 NDRC approved Shanghai Jiaotong University to build ocean deepsea test tank project, China Shipbuilding NDRI Engineering Co.,Ltd undertook the project engineering design task. The ocean deepsea test tank consists of the tank proper and a deep well, equipped with wave generation,wave absorbing, flow generation, wind generation, water depth regulation system and automatic acquisition and real-time analysis system of all test instruments and data, central control system, water circulation system, with deepsea environment test capacity for simulating 3000m water depth, it is the world’s second largest ocean deepsea test tank second only to the Dutch test tank.

During the construction of Shanghai Jiaotong University’s ocean deepsea test tank, China Shipbuilding NDRI Engineering Co.,Ltd was bold enough to adopt international advanced technology, made a lot of breakthrough in flow generation system, engineering technology and equipment selection,solved many technical problems,pushed up key technical indexes of the deepsea test tank to the international advanced level, and established China Shipbuilding NDRI Engineering Co.,Ltd as China’s only scientific research institution which independently grasps refined flow yield design technology.

Since trial operation in 2008,Shanghai Jiaotong University’s ocean deepsea test tank as China’s first of such kind has successively completed more than ten State major project researches including State Natural Science Fund, State Scientific Major Project, State Project 863, etc., carried out several engineering application projects including “Offshore Oil 981” semisubmersible deep-water drilling platform design, gas hydrate drilling coring,also undertook several international cooperation projects, and obtained remarkable achievements. The test tank not only provides favorable conditions for China’s ocean engineering technology particularly deepsea engineering technology Ramp;D, plays an important guiding and support role in carrying out innovative research and solving key technology in the industry for the ship and ocean engineering sectors. Its topnotch performance and research capacity won favor of the international ocean engineering circles and enjoys extensive reputation among the international ocean engineering circles.