China’s longest independently-installed undersea pipeline has been completed in the South China Sea, GB Times reported.
Measuring 195 kilometres in length, the pipeline will likely support the country’s first deepwater natural gas field
The pipe was laid approximately 100 metres below the water’s surface, with each steel tube measuring 80 cm in diameter and weighing 12 tonnes.
It took China’s first indigenous deepwater pipe-laying crane vessel, the 2.8 billion yuan Haiyang Shiyou 201, five months to complete the project.
China’s natural gas fields, such as Liwan 3-1, Liuhua 34-2 and Liuhua 29-1, are mainly located in the South China Sea, 350 kilometres south-east of Hong Kong in the Pearl River Mouth Basin. Liwan 3-1 is estimated to contain 30 billion tonnes of oil and 16 trillion cubic metres of natural gas, equating to a third of the country’s total oil and gas resources.
At the end of 2015, the total length of pipelines for crude, refined oil and natural gas was 112,000 km. It is expected to stretch to 169,000 kilometres by 2020 and 240,000 kilometres by 2025.
Currently, the Nord Stream in the Baltic Sea is the world’s longest offshore pipeline, running for 1,224 kilometers from Vyborg, Russia to the German coast near Greifswald. The twin subsea pipelines can transport up to 55 billion cubic metres of Russian natural gas a year. — Construction+ Online
