Qinghuangdao 32-6 oilfield – exploring the journey of an intelligent offshore oilfield in the deep sea

The oil and gas industry is urgently in need of digital transformation thanks to the looming global energy transition. It needs digital solutions to reconstruct its business and management models in a way that ensures its future competitiveness.

The China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) is the largest offshore oil and gas producer in China. It started digital oilfield construction in 2008 and released its Outline of Smart Oilfield Top-Level Design in 2020. Since then, the CNOOC has partnered with Huawei to deploy digital solutions in its core oil and gas exploration and production (E&P) services, starting the offshore smart oilfield construction. Their Qinhuangdao 32-6 Oilfield pilot project has just been completed.

Huawei Cloud: a solid foundation for offshore oilfields that improved production efficiency by 30%

CNOOC decided to use the Huawei Cloud Stack (HCS) to build a central control system that could connect different systems via a unified platform that enabled delivery of visualized and intelligent IT resources and support digital offshore oilfield construction. The system uses tens of thousands of smart sensors to continuously collect parameter data from different systems, devices, and environments, then feed it to a central hub to be analyzed and processed.

At the same time, the parameter data is transmitted to the land control center of the Tianjin-Qinhuangdao 32-6 Oilfield 200 kilometers away. The central control system's analysis is then used to guide production decision-making. The central control system is the 'brain' and interacts with the 'hub' of the land control center, upgrading the whole intelligent oilfield.

Today, oilfield workers spend most of their time using the intelligent oilfield management system to monitor and plan production in real time. Ren Hongwei, an infrastructure engineer from CNOOC's Tianjin Branch who worked on the intelligent oilfield construction project, said: "We have deployed more than 40 intelligent algorithms for reservoir research and fault analysis models for oil wells on the cloud platform. These algorithms and models can prevent a variety of problems and minimize production losses. Our production efficiency improved 30% during the solution's trial run."

HCS CodeArts: enabling smart applications that cut R&D time by 30%

HCS can be used to build a cloud platform that provides "fertile soil" for smart applications to grow. The platform provides infrastructure enablement, but it's the applications themselves that are the key to intelligence.

In the past, developers lacked unified management tools, code specifications, and standards. CNOOC had more than 3,000 software developers who complained about the previous R&D process, which had made product iteration inefficient and negatively impacted product functions.

In response, CNOOC set up a special research project that eventually adopted CodeArts, a software development pipeline from HCS. The CNOOC has since used CodeArts to develop an intelligent procurement system for procurement execution and warehousing and logistics management, an intelligent oilfield solution for cross-work notification, regional risk notification, real-time operation monitoring, and AI-enabled violation identification, and an application development cloud platform. These systems have helped them build an integrated digital platform for CNOOC's supply chain.

In addition, they have also adopted CodeArts Snap, a smart development assistant for the Pangu R&D model, to unlock smart code generation, smart Q&A, and smart collaboration. These new capabilities helped developers boost development efficiency. For example, they've developed an intelligent, secure, and efficient offshore oil and gas mining and operation model for the Qinhuangdao 32-6 Oilfield. CodeArts Snap helped 500 of the CNOOC's developers compile more than 1.3 million lines of code, and launch more than 100 digital algorithm models under eight core technologies. Their R&D time was reduced by 30%, and the commissioning and deployment time of the intelligent oilfield management system was shortened from one week to one day.

From the intelligent oilfield development system to the intelligent R&D of the management system, cloud computing and artificial intelligence have revolutionized CNOOC's production methods. "Digital and intelligent transformation changed our technical models and our traditional operation and management methods. It also changed our mindset," said Lin Yang, general manager of the intelligent oilfield construction project team from CNOOC Tianjin.

In the future, CNOOC plans to deepen its cooperation with Huawei Cloud to transform oil drilling and production platforms into "smart islands." It will also continuously optimize its production models and management processes, and build intelligent oil and gas fields featuring unmanned operation sites, visualized reservoir research, collaborative production and operations, and scientific strategic decision-making. Huawei is committed to enabling intelligent and efficient offshore oil and gas exploration and production, and contribute to global energy security and economic development. We will develop more scenario-specific solutions to help oil and gas companies 'dive into' deep seas across the globe.