Shangjie, the first "most beautiful offshore oil man", led the team to study hard for 14 years, so as to realize large-scale application of "greedy snake" technology in China's offshore oilfields.

Pearl in the crown of modern oil drilling technology

Greedy snake system is one of the key technologies to explore and develop complex oil and gas storage. It can not only make the drill accurately complete the ultra long distance travel in the underground oil and gas reservoir, unlock the reserves that could not be used before; it can also be applied to the offshore platform to drill the cluster wells which are like the roots of trees, and produce ultra-high oil and gas production; in addition, it can also use the complex acoustic and electrical nuclear instruments integrated behind the drill to accurately detect the surrounding strata at any time.

"Greedy snake" technology is like a hospital miniature behind the drill, which can go deep into the underground strata. It has "laboratory", which uses "electrocardiogram", "B-ultrasound", "X-ray" and "nuclear magnetic resonance" to check and judge the strata; it also has "operating room", which can use precise "scalpel" and "catheter" to accurately remove the underground oil and gas reservoirs. Therefore, this technology is known as the Pearl in the crown of modern oil drilling technology.

Make a garage legend

As a scientific and technological worker of CNOOC, Shangjie is mainly engaged in the research of logging and drilling tools. Since I graduated from the doctoral program in my 20s, I only did one thing after joining CNOOC: I developed logging while drilling (LWD) and rotary steering (drilling system) technology, also known as "greedy snake" technology.

With his interest in precision instruments and enthusiasm for technology research and development, he joined a Research Institute of CNOOC and began a difficult and long process of research and development.

At the beginning of R & D, the team had only four offices, a few computers and seven engineers. Without any testing place, we transformed an abandoned garage into a laboratory and began to tackle the key problems of "ignorance and fearlessness", dreaming of challenging the most cutting-edge technology in the industry. In the laboratory, when the fleas are most rampant, Shangjie sprinkles a circle around his desk and chair with insecticide every morning, and sits in it to design and draw pictures. Just like the monkey king, "enclosure is a prison.". Later, some people described Shangjie team as a Chinese version of "garage legend".

At the beginning, they were destitute. There was no successful precedent in China. They could not touch imported instruments, and their technical data were completely blocked. Shangjie's team looks for every opportunity to go to the operation site to see what the instrument looks like and how others use it. When they come back, they think about it day and night, guess and speculate on the working principle of the instrument, discuss the structure and mechanism of the instrument endlessly, design experiments to verify the idea, and then constantly overthrow it.

It took a whole year to form a technical scheme, development route and test plan of more than 100000 words. In the next few years, Shangjie's team made trial production while designing, and corrected the mistakes in the original plan while experimenting. Every day, they switched between small progress and huge failure. In this way, dozens of circuits, thousands of parts and tens of thousands of lines of code have finally accumulated the immature appearance of "greedy snake".

The quality of the competition only straight overtaking, no curves

At that time, there was still a big gap between the reliability of the technology and the international mature technology. Foreign companies that only rented but did not sell the equipment immediately began to sell the equipment to China, and reduced the service price. However, after repeated failures, Shangjie team has no fear of greater challenges and firmly believes that it can grasp its own destiny.

In the quality competition, there is only a straight line overtaking, no curve. Since then, Shangjie team has been involved in fault tracking and shutdown, batch manufacturing system, operation and maintenance mechanism, operation support and personnel technical training. Since then, the "greedy snake" system has been upgraded dozens of times, and the success rate of operation can catch up with 5 to 6 percentage points every year.

"Success is to be enthusiastic from failure to failure. Every effort in scientific research, there is no 100 points of success, there will be no 0 points of failure. Only by continuous progress, failure and further progress can we approach success. The process of doing things is the biggest reward! " Along the way, Shangjie believed this more and more. Editor / Liu Lu