This year, the China National Petroleum Corporation started drilling what will be the deepest hole in China and be among the deepest holes in the world, in the north-western province of Xinjiang.
An in May from China鈥檚 state-run news agency Xinhua said the project was 鈥渁n unprecedented opportunity to study areas of the planet deep beneath the surface鈥�, drilling down more than 11,000 metres into the billion-year-old strata of the remote Taklamakan desert.
The project鈥檚 more prosaic aim is to identify new reserves of oil and gas.
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at Peking University in China, who is familiar with the project, told 快猫短视频 in June that the purpose of the drilling is 鈥渢o discover whether there is still the occurrence of oil and gas in the ultra-deep depths鈥�.
The well, known as Shendi Take 1, is part of scientific efforts announced by Chinese president Xi Jinping in 2021 to explore the 鈥渄eep earth鈥� for new resources, as the coal-rich but oil-poor country pursues energy security.
The Tarim basin, where the drilling project is located, also contains some of the country鈥檚 largest and deepest oil fields.
According to Liu, the well had reached a depth of 8400 metres as of 21 November. Bloomberg News has reported that the drilling project aims to reach its
By contrast, the 12,262-metre-deep Kola Superdeep Borehole in north-west Russia, which is currently the world鈥檚 deepest hole, took nearly 20 years to complete.
Since May, drilling for at least one other ultra-deep borehole has started, . They say the Shendi Chuanke-1 Well in Sichuan province, which is being developed by PetroChina, an arm of the China National Petroleum Corporation, aims to reach a depth of more than 10,000 metres in search of gas.
