SHANGHAI (Agencies) — China Oilfield Services Ltd (COSL) is in talks to acquire an independent Russian oil services company in an ambitious foray into the vast, under-invested sector, a COSL executive said on Friday.

COSL, a unit of Chinese oil and gas firm CNOOC with a market capitalization of about $2 billion, plans to get a foothold in Russia's massive oil services sector, the world's third-largest after the United States and China, Reuters reported.

"We are looking at a company. COSL will follow the lead of Western companies ... and buy a Russian company as a first step into the market there," Chen Weidong, Executive Vice President of COSL told reporters on the sidelines of an industry forum.

Chen said COSL would take a majority stake in the Russian firm, but the financial size of the deal would not be "significant" as this would be COSL's first overseas acquisition. He declined to name the target company, nor to give a timeline for clinching a deal.

He ruled out Integra and BK Eurasia, two Russian service firms as COSL's acquisition target.

Western service giants such as Schlumberger and Halliburton, who bought into local independents, now control about a third of the Russian service sector. Russian oil majors and independents each hold a third.

Chen said COSL would offer a mid-range service, a niche against the high-end western technology and low-end Russian services.

The service would be focused on onshore drilling, Chen said, adding China's 1,000 drilling rigs ranked it as the world's second-largest, while Russia ranked third with 800.

COSL's attempted investment may be dwarfed by China's first major oil acquisition in Russia -- the $3.5 billion purchase by Chinese major Sinopec of the Udmurtneft oilfield. The deal would pave the way also for China to begin exporting drilling equipment to Russia, an added business Chinese firm had been hoping for.

COSL now gets 17 percent of its revenue from services outside China. It aims to raise that share to 30 percent by 2010, Chen said.

Also China official news agency Xinhua reported that a huge oil tanker, three football fields long and as tall as a 24-story building, was launched Friday in Shanghai.

The ship, which can load or off-load 190,000 barrels of crude oil a day, is called a floating production storage off-loading (FPSO) vessel.

It was designed and built by Shanghai Waigaoqiao Shipbuilding Co. Ltd. and is the largest and most expensive of its kind in China, the company said.

The 300,000-ton dead weight vessel costs 240 million U.S. dollars, close to the cost of an Airbus A380, the world's largest commercial airliner.

The vessel is 323 meters long and 63 meters wide, and measures 71 meters from its keel to the top of its smoke stack. It can store 2 million barrels of crude oil.

Shanghai Waigaoqiao Shipbuilding Co. Ltd. built the vessel for ConocoPillips China Inc.

The FPSO will be put into use in the second-phase project of the Penglai 19-3 Oilfield in China's Bohai Bay, which is jointly funded and run by the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) and ConocoPillips China Inc.