Chinese state oil giant Sinopec is opening a major ultra-deep shale gas find after obtaining official government approval for proven geological reserves of 235.687 billion cubic meters in the Ziyang Dongfeng field in the Sichuan province.
China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation, or Sinopec, as it is more commonly known, has announced that the Ministry of Natural Resources of China approved its reserves validation at the shale gas field, marking the creation of China’s first ultra-deep, 100-billion-cubic-meter-level shale gas field.
Sinopec has pushed exploration and development beyond 4,500 meters (14,764 ft) underground with the use of AI models integrated into geophysical imaging. Combined with breakthroughs in ultra?deep drilling and fracturing, these efforts have yielded a fully proprietary technology system for Cambrian ultra?deep shale gas exploration, the company said.
The field, which is 4,500-5,200 meters deep, has posed globally recognized exploration challenges such as unclear reservoir characteristics, complex accumulation mechanisms, thick difficult-to-drill formations, and extreme heat and pressure, Sinopec said.
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“After over a decade of persistent effort, we have taken Cambrian shale gas from zero to a hundred-billion-cubic-meter-scale reserve base,” commented Liu Wei, director of Sinopec Southwest Petroleum Bureau and representative of Sinopec Southwest Oil & Gas Company.
“This validates the formation’s vast potential and gives us a replicable technical pathway to expand China’s shale gas development frontier.”
Sinopec will now move to the next state of driving “high-quality exploration and production, accelerate capacity growth at Ziyang Dongfeng, and contribute to secure national energy security,” the executive added.
In recent years, Sinopec has been actively exploring and certifying growing volumes of shale oil and gas reserves in China’s onshore basins, despite technically and geologically challenging terrains and ultra-deep formations.
Despite the challenges, shale exploration is an important part of China’s push to boost its domestic oil and gas production in a bid to reduce its significant exposure to imported hydrocarbons.
By Michael Kern for Oilprice.com
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