BEIJING: Asia’s first cylindrical floating production, storage, and offloading (FPSO) facility, the “Haikui No.1”, has been successfully loaded onto the giant semi-submersible vessel “Xinguanghuahao” in Jiaozhou Bay, east China’s Qingdao City, Shandong Province, on Sunday.
The facility, self-developed by China, is now ready to be transported to the Liuhua oilfield in the Pearl River Mouth Basin in the southern part of the country for operation.
At the loading site, dragged by four mooring ropes and pulled by four tugs in different directions, the “Haikui No.1” smoothly arrived at the designated spot on the sea surface.
Leaving the port at about 5:00 on Sunday, the FPSO facility was on the hull of “Xinguanghuahao” around 15:00, during which the deck of Xinguanghuahao” was able to get down to 25 meters under the sea level and steadily lift the facility above the sea surface.
It took over three hours to load the “Haikui No.1” onto the “Xinguanghuahao,” with an allowable error of no more than 50 millimeters between the final position of the FPSO facility and the longer edges of the semi-submersible vessel. Once the ‘Xinguanghuahao’ is fully out of water, the ‘Haikui No.1’ will be welded onto the deck so that the facility remains stable on the ship, even in strong wind and waves during the upcoming maritime transportation.
“It is the first time that we independently used underwater positioning technology in the loading of domestic marine equipment onto a ship, in an effort to ensure accurate placement of the “Haikui No.1,” said Li Wenbo, the towage design manager of “Haikui No.1”.
“We made the technology solutions, completed the complex computational analysis and the construction and command management and other related work all by ourselves. By doing so, we finally realized the goal of independently implementing the whole loading and towing of a super-large cylindrical floating production equipment,” Li said. –The Daily Mail-CGTN news exchange item
