A view of the Fuman Oilfield, located on the northern edge of the Taklimakan Desert in Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. File photo: China Media Group

China's largest desert oilfield, the Fuman Oilfield located on the northern edge of the Taklimakan Desert in Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, has extracted over 26 million tons of oil and gas from depths below 6,000 meters, hitting a major milestone, China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC), the operator of the oilfield, said on Monday.

Recently, at the Zhentan-1 well on the edge of the Taklimakan Desert, engineers pulled up rock cores from 8,080 meters underground - rocks that have been buried for about 500 million years. This marks the first time that China has retrieved a core sample from a depth of more than 8,000 meters in the northwestern Tarim Basin.

The Taklimakan Desert lies in the heart of the Tarim Basin in southern Xinjiang, and forms the main body of this vast inland basin.

"With these precious rock cores, we can analyze and evaluate the hydrocarbon generation potential below 8,000 meters, including the thickness of the oil and gas layers and their maturity levels," Xu Yanan, director of Tarim Oilfield project at CNPC, was quoted as saying in a report by the China Central Television (CCTV) News.

"We have already extracted 20.36 million tons of crude oil and 8.15 billion cubic meters of natural gas from the ultra-deep formations beneath the Taklimakan Desert, with a combined oil and gas equivalent exceeding 26.86 million tons," said Lu Zhongyuan, an engineer at CNPC's Tarim Oilfield, per the CCTV report.

In recent years, the Tarim Oilfield has stepped up ultra-deep oil and gas production in the Taklimakan Desert. At the Fuman Oilfield, a total of 485 ultra-deep wells have been drilled. Among them, 133 wells have each produced more than 100,000 tons of oil and gas in total, and 464 wells have each produced more than 10,000 tons. This has made the Tarim Oilfield China's largest desert oilfield and ultra-deep hydrocarbon production base, according to media reports.

The ultra-deep formations in the Tarim Basin hold abundant oil and gas reserves and represent an important potential area for increasing China's hydrocarbon reserves and production. China has already proven more than 5 billion tons of oil and gas reserves in the Tarim Basin, with over half of them coming from ultra-deep layers, or more than 6,000 meters underground.

Global Times