Sinopec's Xinjiang well heralds ultra-deep success

China has made significant advances in the exploration of oil and gas resources in ultra-deep areas, experts said on Wednesday.

Confirmation of this achievement came after domestic energy company China Petrochemical Corp started drilling the Yuejin 3-3 well in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region on Monday.

The drilling of the Yuejin 3-3 well of the Shendi-1 project in the Tarim Basin of Xinjiang is intended to reach a depth of 9,472 meters, a record for the deepest oil and gas well in Asia.

It represents a major milestone in the country's exploration of deep energy resources that will further guarantee China's national energy security, the company said.

Also known as Sinopec, the company also struck sizable oil and gas flows on Tuesday in an exploration well in the Tarim Basin at a depth of 8,591 meters, another breakthrough in the hunt for hard-to-extract energy resources in the country.

The Shunbei 10X well, located in Xinjiang, tested a daily oil and gas flow of 600,000 cubic meters, making it the 50th well struck at a depth exceeding 8,000 meters in the Shunbei field, Sinopec said in a statement.

With an average well depth of more than 7,300 meters, Shunbei is one of the world's deepest oil and gas fields being commercially developed, with oil and gas production so far reaching 7.7 million metric tons of oil equivalent.

Lin Boqiang, head of the China Institute for Studies in Energy Policy at Xiamen University, said the discovery of the reserves in Shunbei 10X, a key exploration well in the region, confirms the overall connectivity of the oil and gas reservoirs in the central oil and gas area of the Shunbei oil and gas field.

This has significant implications for exploring and developing the reserves in the region on a large scale, Lin said.

The Tarim Basin is a major petroliferous basin in China as well as one of the most difficult to explore due to its harsh ground environment and complicated underground conditions. The discovery reveals a positive resource prospect in the region, he said.

Ma Yongsheng, president of Sinopec, said the company will step up the deep oil and gas exploration in the country in the years to come.

In recent years, China has achieved a series of breakthroughs in the exploration and development of deep oil and gas resources. China's oil and gas reserves in the deep and ultra-deep layers are equivalent to 67.1 billion tons of oil equivalent that account for 34 percent of the country's total oil and gas reserves.

The Tarim Basin, for example, has oil resources buried between 6,000 meters and 10,000 meters that account for 83.2 percent of its total, while the corresponding figure for natural gas is as high as 63.9 percent, the company said.