Abstract:
Aiming at the worldwide technical challenges in developing offshore low-permeability oil and gas resources, including limited platform operating space, great difficulties in bulk material supply, severe cross-interference of multi-process operations, low efficiency of fracturing-to-production operations and high comprehensive development costs, this paper proposes a new offshore factory-mode fracturing development pattern to realize the economical and large-scale exploitation of offshore low-permeability oil and gas resources. Taking the smooth operation of material flow, operation flow and data flow as the main line, this paper constructs the “3 Flows and 6 Systems” engineering architecture by adopting technical measures of ship-based intensive equipment, continuous material supply, three-dimensional spatial synergy, batch-processing operation procedures, closed-loop environmental treatment and intelligent decision-making support, and establishes 6 subsystems, i.e., integrated pumping, material supply, fracturing-to-production, flowback treatment, three-dimensional synergy, and digital-intelligent decision-making. The Technology Readiness Level (TRL) method is used to evaluate the technical maturity of the whole system, identify key research priorities and potential risks at different technical levels, and formulate corresponding prevention-and-control strategies. The results show that the core equipment and technologies of the integrated pumping, fracturing-to-production and three-dimensional synergy subsystems are mature and ready for engineering application. The material supply and flowback treatment subsystems are in the integration and verification stage, which are the key research priorities at the present stage. The digital-intelligent decision-making subsystem is a forward-looking R&D orientation and represents the future core competitiveness. Engineering application of this pattern is expected to reduce the comprehensive fracturing-to-production cycle of a single well by about 30 % and cut operation costs by more than 30%. As a systematic reconstruction of all-operation elements for offshore fracturing, the offshore factory-mode fracturing pattern can promote the transformation of offshore low-permeability oil-gas development from sporadic single-well operations to multi-well batch collaborative operations. It can effectively solve the bottlenecks of low efficiency and high cost in offshore low-permeability oil-gas field development, provide a systematic technical scheme for the economical development of hundreds-of-millions-ton-scale hard-to-produce offshore low-permeability reserves, and play an important supporting role in increasing China’s offshore oil-gas reserves and production as well as realizing the independent controllability of industrial chains.