Far east strategies
Thermo oil systems used in oil production in China

The continued rapid expansion of the Chinese economy means that exploitation of new energy deposits is vital for the country’s future. As a result, transformation in the People’s Republic of China from the traditional primary energy sources, i.e. hard coal and brown coal, to oil and natural gas has become a high-priority goal for government energy strategists in Peking.

The “Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation” (CNOOC) is a state-owned company which is listed on the stock exchange. In collaboration with foreign partners, CNOOC carries out oil and gas exploration off the coast of China. New oil fields are currently being developed at a breathtaking pace in the South China Sea and in Bohai Bay which is located about 200 km east of Peking. Oil rigs supply oil to a platform for processing. These platforms resemble oil tankers with a size of about three hundred to five hundred thousand gross register tons. On the platforms, gas is removed from the crude oil and water elements are extracted. To condition the oil so that it can be pumped efficiently, the temperature in the oil tanks is kept at 60 to
80 °C. This requires a large amount of thermic energy, with demand ranging between 30 and 50 MW. If gas deposits are available in the oil field, power-heat coupling is an obvious option, and this approach is currently being implemented using HTT energy systems on the Bohai BZ 25-1 project.
Four thermo
boilers are the core
Four gas turbines with a capacity of 13 MW each are used to generate electricity. The temperature of the hot waste gas flowing out of the turbines is about 500 °C, and a thermo oil system extracts 4 x 12 MW of thermic energy from the waste gas. A thermo oil thermo oil heat recovery unit, which has four successive thermo boilers with a capacity of 4.5 MW each, forms the core of the system. The entire unit is located on deck, which means that special requirements have to be met, for example corrosion protection. The performance data and tight completion schedule on this project are both very impressive. The schedule only allows six months from initial system engineering work to shipment to China. HTT components will be shipped to China at the beginning of December.