A borehole with a depth of more than 10,000 meters is being drilled in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwestern China.
Xinhua/Aramie Stock Photo
China’s largest oil producer has begun drilling a hole expected to reach more than 10,000 meters deep in the country’s remote Taklimakan desert. The borehole could be one of the deepest ever drilled, giving researchers new geological insights and access to ultra-deep oil reserves.
China National Petroleum Corporation began drilling the borehole on May 30, according to China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency. The narrow borehole was designed to reach a depth of 11,100 meters, the report said.
Located in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in the northwest of the country, the borehole will be the deepest in China and one of the deepest in the world. The deepest hole in the world is the 12,262-meter Kola super-deep well in northwestern Russia, which took 20 years to drill.
Sinopec, an oil refiner that is also involved in the project, said in a statement that it will drill this new borehole, called Project Deep Earth 1-Yuejin 3-3XC Well, in record time. said he was aiming for According to Bloomberg News, the plan is to drill to maximum depth within 457 days. According to Xinhua, the bottom of the pit reaches rocks that formed during the Cretaceous period, 66 million to 145 million years ago.
In my 2021 speech…
Chinese President Xi Jinping has named the “deep earth” as one of four strategic frontiers for the country’s scientific community. At the time, Egan Shu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said the new focus on geological exploration was largely driven by China’s need to reduce its dependence on imported minerals, metals and oil and gas.
Xinjiang’s Tarim Basin is home to some of China’s largest and deepest oil fields, and Sinopec is also developing ultra-deep wells elsewhere in the region. This includes the Shunbei oil and gas field, where the company said it has drilled 49 wells deeper than 8,000 meters.
This drilling project could also provide researchers with insight into the unique geology of the Tarim Basin. This basin collects water drained from three mountain ranges and is thought to have formed during the closure of the Paleo-Asian Ocean more than 200 million years ago.
“This is very much like an industrial oil drilling project, not a scientific drilling project,” says Edward Sobel of the University of Potsdam, Germany. “Research wells usually try hard not to discover oil and gas.”
Still, if core sample collection and geophysical measurements are included, the drilling project could provide researchers with insight into the unique geology of the Tarim Basin, he says.
The basin itself is more than a billion years old, with stable bedrock covered with sediments dating back hundreds of millions of years, Sobel said. “There are fairly continuous piles of sediments from the Cambrian. [period] He says this is comparable to the formations found in the Grand Canyon.
topic:
