【Ten Years of Rapid Development in Chemical Equipment】1320–2023: China’s First Underground Gas Storage Facility Has Operated Safely and Stably for 48 Years

Thread Content

As of December 3, 2023, China’s first underground gas storage facility – the Dian Gas Storage Facility in the Daqing Oilfield – has been in operation for over 17,000 days, achieving zero accidents related to safety and environmental protection throughout its 48 years of existence. To address the issue of storing the large amounts of associated gas in oil fields, Daqing Oil Field built China’s first underground gas storage facility in the Dian Oil Field in 1975. The petroleum workers in Daqing established oil and gas buffer zones and deployed a unified monitoring system for these areas to track the movement of the oil-gas interface. They also set standards for controlling oil intrusion and gas migration. As a result, a technology for stabilizing the oil-gas interface, centered on prevention, monitoring, and control, was developed, which ensured the effectiveness of oil field development while enabling peak demand management and supply assurance. “The Dian Gas Storage Facility in the Daqing Oilfield has given rise to a total of 4 integrated technologies: fine reservoir description technologies centered on structure, sedimentation, and reservoir characteristics; injection and production operation technologies focused on analysis, evaluation, and optimization; gas storage facility wellbore integrity technologies aimed at evaluation, early warning, and risk control; and oil-gas interface stability technologies. They not only provide a solid guarantee for the long-term safe operation of gas storage facilities, but also accumulate valuable experience for the construction and development of such facilities in our country. ”Fan Wenke, head of the Natural Gas Department at the Daqing **Dian Oilfield Geological Research Institute, explained. The Daqing Oilfield has consistently focused on standardizing operational procedures, strengthening coordination across various production stages, in order to achieve the goals of safe, economical, and efficient operation management. At present, this gas storage facility has formulated various regulations such as the \"Regulations on the Operation Management of Gas Storage Facilities\" and the \"Emergency Plan for Oil Intrusion and Gas Leakage in Gas Storage Facilities\", and has developed seven innovative management systems for gas storage facilities, thereby becoming a leader in terms of system management for gas storage facilities in China. Given the flammable and explosive nature of natural gas, the team established a risk early-warning group to enhance the analysis and prediction of emerging issues, and employed interactive inspection methods to identify problems, achieving good results. In recent years, due to the long commissioning time of the **Dian storage reservoir and the safety hazards that arose during its operation, the Daqing Oilfield has carried out comprehensive upgrades and standardization efforts on the surface processes at the injection stations as well as on the gas injection and production systems. Today, the 14 gas wells at the Dian Gas Storage Facility in the Daqing Oil Field are equipped with intelligent remote monitoring and alarm systems at the surface; their daily gas injection capacity reaches 1 million cubic meters, while the annual volume of gas used for peak-shaving purposes amounts to 100 million cubic meters. The **Dian Gas Storage Facility in the Daqing Oil Field takes into account the dynamic changes in oilfield development; it carries out extraction in winter and injection in summer, thereby playing a role in regulating gas supply by smoothing out peaks and filling in valleys. This ensures a stable supply of natural gas, reduces waste resulting from the release of excess gas, effectively addresses the imbalance in gas demand between winter and summer in the Longjiang region, and safeguards the environment for the comprehensive development of oil and gas resources.