China wants to continue gaining independence to meet its domestic demand for gas. On Thursday, the China National Petroleum Corporation. Drilling of a 10,520-meter-deep well has begun in Sichuan province, in the heart of the country. Titled “Shendi Chuanke 1”, the project aims to find natural gas reserves at very great depths, according to the Xinhua news agency.
Indeed, Sichuan is home to vast shale gas reserves whose major state oil groups have yet to tap their full potential. These difficulties are due to the terrain, which is very mountainous, as well as the complexity of the underground geology.
A first experimental well
Shendi Chuanke 1 comes two months after the drilling of a first well in the Xinjiang region located in the extreme west of the country, a project also managed by China National Petroleum Corp. Described as the deepest work ever carried out in China, this first well it was more experimental and was aimed at testing drilling technologies and providing data on the internal structure of the Earth, as Bloomberg recalls.
For some years now, the Chinese government has been pressuring energy companies to increase domestic production and thus strengthen the country’s security of supply. Increased pressure due to the war in Ukraine that has fueled geopolitical conflicts, power outages and volatility in world energy prices.
This well is the deepest known for gas, but it is still lower than the deepest oil wells. The net length record is held by the Kola well, in northern Russia, with a vertical depth of 12,262 meters. And in total length (vertical plus horizontal), it is the Sakhalin I well, in the extreme east of Siberia, which holds the record with about 15 kilometers drilled.
Source: BFM TV
