Case Study: China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) achieves 3D reality mesh and CNY 1M cost savings with Bentley's digital twin solution

CNOOC Pilots 3D Reality Modeling to Improve China’s Offshore Oil Operations

China National Offshore Oil Corporation piloted a 3D reality‑modeling program to digitalize offshore operations across its rigs and FPSO platforms but faced severe data‑collection and integration challenges in the deep‑sea environment (magnetic/oceanic interference, multisource optics/laser/thermal data). To create a digital twin and web‑based GIS for remote lifecycle management, CNOOC turned to Bentley, using ContextCapture, Descartes, Pointools, OpenPlant, and OpenCities Planner to process and manage multisource data.

Bentley processed 325 videos, 7,498 images and 844 point clouds (about 653 GB) to generate an accurate 3D reality mesh and integrated engineering models, delivering the reality mesh in 150 days instead of years. The Bentley solution enabled remote inspections and smarter maintenance, reduced offshore trips and transport costs (CNY 1 million saved short term, projected CNY 10 million long term), saved tens of millions of yuan in modeling time, and set the foundation to connect the model to the Bentley iTwin platform for automated control.

China National Offshore Oil Corporation

Baoshan Shi

Senior Engineer