A world-class challenge has been solved! China has achieved a major breakthrough in deep‑oil and gas exploration equipment technology.
2026-04-11
On March 31, in waters near Hainan Island, CNOOC Services’ self-developed “Haijing” and “Haimai” systems completed their first joint operation, marking a significant leap in China’s autonomous marine exploration technologies—from “individual‑unit advancement” to “coordinated operations.”
This operation marks the first domestic implementation of coordinated operations among three types of vessels—towed streamers, seismic sources, and node‑based systems. It innovatively established a synchronous operational framework integrating “three‑vessel source‑streamer acquisition plus sparse seabed nodes,” seamlessly bridging the two mainstream marine exploration paradigms of streamer‑based and node‑based technologies. The campaign validated the reliability, stability, and environmental adaptability of domestically developed exploration equipment in multi‑mode, synergistic operations across complex offshore environments.
The operations area is situated at the forefront of reserve‑increment efforts in the trillion‑cubic‑meter gas‑rich field off Hainan Island. Within this region, extensive fuzz zones are widely developed and overlain by large‑scale, complex faults, giving rise to a world‑class geological challenge.
The project team, focusing on key geological challenges, innovatively proposed a joint towed‑cable and seabed seismic acquisition scheme. For the first time, they adopted a hybrid “seabed‑cable + seabed‑node” exploration approach, which not only addresses the technical limitations of conventional towed‑cable surveys—namely, the lack of large‑offset information that compromises velocity‑field analysis—but also significantly reduces operational costs compared to standalone seabed‑node acquisition while increasing sampling density. By leveraging high‑resolution raw data and advanced velocity‑field modeling, the team precisely characterizes subsurface hydrocarbon distribution.
During the survey operations, adverse sea conditions significantly impeded the progress of nodal deployment. To address this, the project team implemented measures such as extending the towed streamer’s shot‑line spacing, optimizing the placement of marine seismic nodes, and adopting sparse‑node acquisition strategies, resulting in a marked improvement in operational efficiency. While ensuring data quality, the team achieved enhanced efficiency and reduced overall costs by implementing a “single‑pass acquisition, dual‑data sets, complementary synergy” approach.
Notably, this major breakthrough in autonomous equipment‑based collaborative operations aligns closely with the key themes of the 16th Asia‑Pacific Conference on Unconventional Energy (ECF2026), scheduled to convene in Shanghai this October—namely, the development of deep and complex reservoirs and innovations in equipment. In particular, the “Haijing + Haiwei” approach, with its advances in high‑precision imaging of deep oil and gas formations and velocity‑field modeling, offers critical technical guidance for integrated geological‑engineering exploration and development of unconventional energy resources, including shale oil and gas, tight oil and gas, and deep coalbed methane. During the conference, experts from domestic and international oil and gas companies, research institutes, and equipment‑manufacturing firms will engage in in‑depth discussions on such cutting‑edge technologies, fostering a seamless transition from technological breakthroughs to large‑scale applications in the unconventional energy sector.
In this joint deployment, the core performance of our in-house‑developed equipment has been thoroughly validated: the enhanced “HaiMai HQN500S” node device boasts a 30% increase in endurance compared to the baseline model. Once activated and lowered into the water, it initiates an independent internal data‑acquisition sequence without requiring external communication, effectively mitigating signal interference and delivering outstanding operational performance even under challenging marine conditions.
In the deployed “Haijing” system, the towed‑cable integrated navigation suite has undergone a technological upgrade, successfully mastering multi‑vessel collaborative navigation and positioning. By optimizing a multi‑link aggregation communication data‑transmission scheme, it ensures the real‑time, stable transfer of massive amounts of data among vessels, significantly enhancing navigation and positioning accuracy under conditions involving long towed cables and large cable counts, thereby laying a robust technical foundation for the efficient advancement of multi‑vessel coordinated operations.
The experience gained from this operation in coordinating multi‑vessel campaigns, along with the validation of the “Haijing + Haimei” hybrid exploration model, has laid a solid foundation for larger‑scale offshore oil and gas exploration efforts. Moreover, it has opened up new avenues for extending this technological approach into deepwater applications, marking a new phase of synergistic development in China’s independent marine seismic exploration capabilities.
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