Key points
- The vessel was officially named Mengxiang (Dream) and began sea trials on December 18, 2023, after construction began November 30, 2021.
- Designed and built by China State Shipbuilding Corporation for the China Geological Survey, with more than 150 participating organizations.
- Mengxiang has a gross tonnage of about 33,000, length 179.8 meters, beam 32.8 meters, range 15,000 nautical miles, 120 day endurance and can drill to 11,000 meters below the sea surface.
- It carries an independently developed 400 meter class riserless mud recovery system and a shipboard laboratory complex of more than 3,000 square meters across nine laboratories.
On December 18, China’s first domestically designed and built ocean drilling vessel was officially named Mengxiang (Dream) and departed Nansha, Guangzhou, for sea trials. The milestone marks a key step in building China’s deep-sea exploration capability and modernizing its equipment.
The China Geological Survey (CGS) of the Ministry of Natural Resources, pursuing the goal of independently designing and building a world-leading ocean drilling vessel, worked closely with more than 150 participating research and construction organizations. Construction began on November 30, 2021, the main hull was joined on December 18, 2022, and the vessel was officially named Mengxiang and began sea trials on December 18, 2023. Full completion is expected in 2024. Once in service, Mengxiang will mainly carry out major national science and technology projects and international ocean scientific drilling missions.
Mengxiang was designed and built by China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC). The vessel has a gross tonnage of about 33,000, an overall length of 179.8 meters and a beam of 32.8 meters, with a range of 15,000 nautical miles and an endurance of 120 days. Its stability and structural strength are designed to the safety requirements of category 16 typhoon sea conditions. It is capable of unrestricted operations in all global sea areas and can drill to 11,000 meters below the sea surface.
Built to a design philosophy of small tonnage, multiple functions and modular construction, Mengxiang achieved breakthroughs in more than ten key technologies and incorporates a number of world-first designs, with overall equipment and integrated operating capability at an internationally leading level. The ship carries what CGS describes as the world’s most advanced drilling system, including a deep-water riserless mud recovery (RMR) system developed independently in China, which has achieved a from-zero-to-one breakthrough in 400 meter class RMR development. The shipboard laboratory complex covers more than 3,000 square meters and comprises nine laboratories spanning basic geology, paleomagnetism, inorganic geochemistry, organic geochemistry, microbiology, marine science, natural gas hydrate, geophysics and drilling technology, equipped with a world-class magnetically shielded room, ultra-clean laboratory space and the world’s first shipboard automated core transfer and storage system, sufficient to support research across all marine disciplines. The vessel also carries a large integrated information system for a research ship, made up of nine subsystems including a resilient network, cloud data services, integrated dispatch, operations monitoring and laboratory management, using hyper-converged infrastructure, cloud services, a data middle platform and digital twin technologies. More than 20,000 monitoring points across the ship allow full-process monitoring of drilling and coring operations and intelligent coordination of scientific experiments.
The main objective of this first trial voyage is to verify the power system. Mengxiang is fitted with a latest-generation 30 megawatt closed-loop ring-main power station, and is the first vessel in the world to apply both energy storage technology and a closed-loop grid to a DP-3 class dynamic positioning system, substantially improving economy and reliability and cutting energy consumption by more than 15 percent.
The vessel’s supporting infrastructure, including a drilling support ship, wharves and a core repository, is already in service. The support ship Haiyang Dizhi 2 (Marine Geology 2), China’s first research vessel converted from an offshore engineering ship, can accompany Mengxiang on global operations and can also conduct offshore engineering work and marine research independently. It has completed a number of significant assignments, including the sea trial of China’s first floating ocean thermal energy conversion unit, and has spent nearly 500 days working at sea. The south and north wharves are China’s first purpose-built deep-water research vessel berths and will provide shore-based support for Mengxiang’s operations. The ocean drilling core repository offers five storage temperature levels, at ambient temperature, 4 C, -20 C, -80 C and -196 C, to meet different sample storage requirements, and can hold core samples totalling 450,000 meters in cumulative length, making it the largest ocean drilling core repository in the world by storage capacity.
Ocean scientific drilling is often described as the crown of marine science and technology. According to CGS, Mengxiang’s internationally leading ocean drilling capability is intended to serve national energy security, to support the scientific ambition of drilling through the Moho discontinuity into the upper mantle to advance Earth system science, and to underpin the development of deep-Earth resources. Once completed, the vessel is expected to provide key equipment support for the industrialization of natural gas hydrate exploration and production, to support China’s plans for an international ocean drilling science program, and to strengthen the country’s capabilities in deep-sea access, deep-sea exploration and deep-sea development.
