Recent days have seen the official delivery of the world’s first M350 Floating Production Storage and Offloading vessel (FPSO), jointly developed and designed by Dalian Shipbuilding Industry Co., Ltd (DSIC) and Mitsui Ocean Development & Engineering Company (MODEC), marking a significant breakthrough in China’s FPSO shipbuilding industry.

The M350 FPSO is a comprehensive large-scale offshore oil production base that integrates personnel accommodation and production command systems and is capable of oil and gas separation, treatment of oily wastewater, power generation, heating, and storage and transportation of crude oil products. The size and scale of this FPSO set world records. It is 364 meters long, 64 meters wide, and 33 meters deep, with a designed draft of 22.65 meters, a displacement of over 460,000 tons, and a deck area of 17,400 square meters, comparable to three standard soccer fields. It can process 220,000 barrels of crude oil per day, equivalent to a 10-square-kilometer land-based oil and gas processing plant, and its upper module for oil and gas processing weighs 50,000 tons. Besides, the vessel has as many as 34,000 pipes weighing about 4,000 tons, and the total length of its cables is approximately 800,000 meters, equivalent to the straight-line distance from Dalian to Shanghai. Its coating area is about 880,000 square meters, while the construction volume of specialized components is three times greater than that of a conventional VLCC ship type.

This FPSO is the seventh newly-built FPSO by DSIC and also marks the first collaboration between DSIC and two globally recognized companies, FPSO general contractor MODEC and oil major Equinor, in the field of new FPSO construction. This new type of FPSO is designed and built in accordance with informatization and digitization management for its entire life cycle, featuring full 3D design and visualized construction and meeting the end user’s requirements for informatization and digitization operation and maintenance. Additionally, it is the world’s first ultra-large offshore engineering project to apply the latest specifications of Det Norske Veritas (DNV), suitable for oil and gas development operations in many sea areas around the world, with a design life of over 30 years.