2 COOEC Modules Ready for Canadian LNG Project

A COOEC employee gives instructions during the building of a module in Qingdao, Shandong province. The module is for LNG Canada, an energy project in Kitimat, Canada.[Photo/China Daily]

Offshore Oil Engineering Co Ltd, or COOEC, has completed the building of, and delivered, two modules for core processes, slated for a major Canadian liquefied natural gas project, in Qingdao, Shandong Province, on Saturday, labeling itself as the world's first to adopt integrated construction solutions.

Another breakthrough reflecting China's construction capacity in the sector, the two delivered modules will be used in the acid gas-removing processes of the LNG Canada project, an important part of the safety guarantee work.

LNG Canada is a large industrial energy project that aims to build and operate a terminal for the liquefaction, storage, and loading of LNG in the port of Kitimat, British Columbia, Canada.

"The very construction of the modules adopts integrated construction solutions, which is the first in the world in the LNG modular parts building sector," said Zhuang Hongchang, the project manager with COOEC, a unit of the State-owned oil giant China National Offshore Oil Corp.

COOEC leveraged improved modular integration techniques, which help halve the on-site installation workload, shorten the construction period and save on costs, Zhuang said.

The tonnage and size of the modules are 1.5 times that of regular ones, with a single deck weighing nearly 700 metric tons, which was "a hard nut to crack during production".

Many other technological innovations have also been made during the construction process, such as those in the chemical degreasing services, which are solely carried out by the COOEC, a blank area for Chinese companies for quite a long time.

According to COOEC, the first phase of the project includes building two liquefaction trains with a capacity of 13 million tons, and the company is responsible for building 35 process modules for the project, including 19 core parts, with a total weight of 178,830 tons.

The first public core process module arrived at the worksite in Canada in early March.

According to Yu Yi, chairman of COOEC, the company has started construction on all 35 process modules and 32 of them have completed the assembly process. The overall construction progress has reached almost 80 percent.

"The LNG Canada project is another large-scale task of core process modular building for the company following the world's first polar LNG project－the Yamal LNG project," Yu said.

The COOEC Qingdao yard is among some 50 shipbuilding and ocean engineering players located in the Qingdao West Coast New Area, which will also be home to one of China's three planned major shipbuilding bases in the years to come.