On March 10, China’s first domestically designed and built integrated large-scale offshore fracturing vessel, “Haiyang Shiyou 696,” was officially delivered in Zhoushan, Zhejiang Province. The vessel fills a key gap in China’s offshore oil and gas fracturing technology and engineering equipment, marking an important step toward strengthening the country’s offshore energy development capability and safeguarding national energy security.

The Haiyang Shiyou 696 measures 99.8 meters in length and 22 meters in width, with a deck area equivalent to about 3.5 basketball courts. Its size ranks first among similar vessels worldwide. Equipped with a full set of fracturing equipment, the vessel can perform high-displacement, high-power offshore large-scale fracturing operations. With its highly integrated and intelligent design, the ship’s overall performance is among the world’s leading vessels of its kind.

According to a representative from the Engineering Technology Operations Center of CNOOC Tianjin Company, the vessel possesses strong continuous operation capability and large material storage capacity. It can pump 12 cubic meters of slurry per minute—equivalent to filling a household bathtub in just two seconds—improving operational efficiency by nearly 40%. This capability enables previously hard-to-develop oil and gas resources to become new frontiers for efficient development, significantly advancing the exploitation of China’s offshore low-permeability oil and gas resources.

Hydraulic fracturing involves pumping high-pressure fluid into an oil wellbore using high-pressure pumps, raising the pressure at the bottom of the well beyond the formation threshold and creating fractures between the wellbore and low-permeability reservoirs. These fractures act like “highways” for industrial oil and gas flow, making fracturing a critical technology for efficiently developing low-permeability oil and gas resources. Although China possesses abundant offshore low-permeability oil and gas resources, the special operating environment has limited operational scale and intensity compared with onshore operations, leaving considerable development potential untapped.

To address the global challenge of limited offshore operating space, the design team pioneered a multi-layer “stacked” three-dimensional layout, integrating fracturing equipment across four decks to achieve large capacity within a compact vessel. In addition, the vessel is the first in the world to adopt a fully electric propulsion system for fracturing ships, significantly increasing power output while reducing carbon emissions. It also offers an endurance of more than 10,000 nautical miles.

According to the Bohai Petroleum Research Institute of CNOOC Tianjin Company, the vessel is equipped with China’s first offshore fracturing intelligent decision-making command center. The system enables real-time data collection, online analysis, and intelligent decision support throughout the fracturing process, transforming operational decisions from experience-based judgment to data- and AI-driven scientific decision-making, significantly improving operational safety and efficiency.

After delivery, the Haiyang Shiyou 696 will be deployed to the Bohai Sea and other offshore areas to carry out fracturing operations aimed at boosting oil and gas production. Its commissioning is expected to accelerate efficient and large-scale development of China’s offshore low-permeability oil and gas fields and help overcome long-standing bottlenecks in offshore resource exploitation.