China started drilling a similar hole in May this year
It should be noted that earlier in May, Chinese scientists started drilling a 32,808 feet (10,000 yards) deep hole in the Earth’s outer layer (crust) to search for new deposits.
According to the Chinese newspaper ‘South China Morning Post’, PetroChina Southwest Oil and Gas Field Company started the drilling of this well named ‘Shendi Chuanke One’ on Thursday.
These ultra-deep wells are more than nine thousand meters deep and these drilling projects are considered to be technically challenging in the gas engineering industry.
“The excavation of Shendi Chuanke One is part of the Deep Earth Drilling Project, which aims to support China’s future scientific research and development of oil and gas reserves,” wrote the official China Electric Power News.
China is the fourth largest natural gas producer in the world as of 2021, and its gas supply has exceeded oil.
Energy security has become an important issue for China in recent years in the context of regional disputes, energy shortages and global price fluctuations.
For China, these very deep wells are very important for extracting oil and gas. China’s Sichuan province is home to large gas reserves.
Beijing-based oil and gas company Sinopec is extracting gas from offshore reefs in Sichuan and has discovered gas fields in Puyang, Yuanba and Chuanxi.
PetroChina Southwest Oil and Gas Field Co. is overseeing the Chuanke One project (Photo: Xinhua News)
PetroChina Southwest Oil and Gas Field Company is overseeing the Chuanke One project. If the drilling is successful, a new area of gas storage is expected to be discovered.
Ding Wai, deputy manager of the project, says that the team will collect geological information from a depth of 10,000 meters to update the assumptions related to oil and gas, and an international and first-class team will be prepared in China.
According to Chief Engineer Yang Yu, “The temperature of 224 degrees Celsius below 10,000 meters can make drilling equipment as soft as noodles, and the ultra-high pressure of 138 MPa is higher than the pressure in the world’s deepest ocean.”