China’s Boldest Oil Hunt Yet

In October last year, China’s CNOOC reported record oil and gas production from a field called Deep Sea #1. The field was the company’s first ultra-deep project, an example of the pursuit of new, untapped resources that lie deeper under the sea. Yet it’s not only ultradeep offshore drilling that the Chinese are focusing on. Right now, China is building a new rig that should be able to drill much deeper than any other rig—onshore.

Led by the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, the project involves a number of research institutions and companies. Its purpose: to develop a smart drilling rig that could reach depths of 15,000 meters, or about 50,000 feet. “The Deep Earth National Science and Technology Megaproject is a forward-looking strategy that aligns with global scientific frontiers while ensuring national energy and resource security,” state news outlet Xinhua said, as quoted by the South China Morning Post.

Scientific frontiers aside, it’s all about the oil and gas and other mineral resources. That was the purpose of a CNPC project in the Tarim Basin in Northwestern China, where the state oil major experimented with drilling depths of up to 11,000 meters. The drilling began in 2023. Last year, after 279 days of drilling, the drill broke the 10,000-meter mark, per Chinese media reports, making the well the deepest ever drilled in the country. It was also the deepest well drilled in Asia—and the fastest drilled well of over 10,000 meters. The well was completed in March last year.

Drilling ultra-deep wells is certainly a challenging endeavor. The deeper you go, the hotter it gets, and this can interfere with the process, which is why ultradeep drilling is not yet standard practice. However, the fact that Chinese energy companies and researchers teamed up on the subject is telling—and it tells us that China is prepared to go to these lengths to increase the degree of self-sufficiency in the energy space.

The Shendi Take 1 well—the one that CNPC drilled in the Tarim Basin—cuts through 13 layers of rock, reaching formations that are 500 million years old. The new drill that the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences-led team is developing will make it possible to cut even deeper into the Earth’s crust and tap new oil and gas. And there is lots of these at such depths.

The Shendi Take 1 well is certainly an achievement. But it is not the deepest well drilled in the world. That honor falls to the Chayvo well, drilled offshore Russia’s Sakhalin island by a local subsidiary of Exxon—the operator of the Sakhalin-1 project. The Chayvo well exceeds 12,000 meters in depth, which makes it 15 times longer than the world’s tallest building, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa. The deposit, which the well was drilled into, holds an estimated 2.3 billion barrels of crude oil and 480 billion cu m of natural gas.

This is the ultimate reason for the ultra-deep drilling exercises: finding new hydrocarbon resources. Because the biggest energy challenge that human civilization faces—as articulated by “Landman” protagonist Tommy Norris—is whether we would find an alternative before it runs out. There are schools of thought that argue there is in fact an unending supply of hydrocarbons in the Earth’s crust. While that remains debatable, it is a fact that the world’s undiscovered oil and gas resources lie in greater depths than previously considered standard. Researching ultra-deep drilling is an example of adaptation to the changing realities of energy supply.

China is the most obvious candidate for such research and experiments. The largest crude oil and gas importer in the world has substantial local reserves of hydrocarbons, but reaching them is more challenging than it is, say, in the Permian. Hence the concerted investment in ultra-deep drilling and the pursuit of “leading-edge scientific breakthroughs as soon as possible” – even as China cements its dominance in the wind and solar sector.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com