A new gas storage facility will serve as one of the sources for peak shaving and supply assurance during the heating season in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, enabling residents to stay warm throughout the winter.

The safe and cost-effective facility would help keep millions of households warm in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region struck by the cold wave recently.

The offshore gas storage facility in waters off Hebei province's Tangshan in the Bohai Sea, which is said to be the country's first offshore gas storage facility, started delivering natural gas to the region via pipelines on Tuesday, according to the facility's operator PetroChina Jidong Oilfield Company.

The Nanpu No 1 Gas Storage Facility is expected to supply 350 million cubic meters of natural gas to the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region during the current 2024-2025 heating season, benefiting approximately 3.5 million households, said Zhang Yongdong, head of the company's gas storage construction department.

As the gas supplier for peak shaving and supply assurance, the facility is located more than 3,000 meters underground beneath an artificial island, converted from a used oil and gas reservoir, Zhang said.

Designed to store gas during periods of low demand and release it during peak usage times, it has a storage capacity of 1.814 billion cubic meters.

"By utilizing the depleted oil and gas reservoir space to store natural gas underground, our gas storage facility saves on exploration investment and construction costs compared to building new aboveground storage facilities," said Hao Dayong, head with the company's surface engineering center.

"Since it was the first time building a gas storage facility offshore, we had carefully assessed the upper limit of the geological pressure the storage facility could withstand," Hao said.

Hao added that they had also created a four-dimensional geomechanical model of the gas storage trap geological body and calculated its safety and gas tightness by simulating the destructive forces of various geological disasters, all to ensure the safe operation of offshore gas storage facility.

According to a report by Hebei Daily, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region — in which the natural gas heating is one of the primary methods of winter heating — has the greatest need for peak load regulation and supply assurance for natural gas in the country.

To guarantee the region's capacity for energy supply, the company plans to continue expanding its gas storage capabilities by developing clusters of storage facilities.

It has already conducted researches on five oil reservoir-based gas storage facilities and is currently constructing two. In future, they will build four clusters comprising a total of 15 gas storage units, establishing a gas storage center in North China, according to the company.

"This will further enhance the peak shaving and supply guarantee capabilities for natural gas in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region," Zhang said.

On a nationwide scale, natural gas supply is relatively sufficient for this winter, with peak shaving and storage capacity increased by eight billion cubic meters compared to last year, ensuring that all necessary reserves were in place before winter, according to Li Chunlin, deputy head of the National Development and Reform Commission, who made the remark at a news conference in October.

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