China’s first domestically designed and built integrated large-scale fracturing vessel was delivered on Tuesday in Zhoushan City, east China’s Zhejiang Province.

The vessel, codenamed Haiyang Shiyou 696, will soon be deployed to offshore oilfields in remote waters, including in the Bohai Sea, to carry out hydraulic fracturing operations aimed at boosting productivity from low-permeability and low-mobility seabed oil and gas reservoirs.

Large-scale fracturing vessels are considered key engineering equipment for efficiently developing such offshore resources. The delivery of Haiyang Shiyou 696 fills a gap in China's offshore oil and gas fracturing technology and engineering equipment, and is expected to enhance the country's offshore energy development capacity and energy security.

"We have also equipped the vessel with China's first offshore intelligent decision-making command center for fracturing operations. The system enables real-time data collection, online analysis and AI-assisted decision-making throughout the fracturing process, upgrading operational decisions from experience-based judgment to data- and AI-driven scientific assessment," said Zhang Ming, chief drilling and completion engineer at the Bohai Oilfield Research Institute of China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC)'s Tianjin branch.