China has begun digging a huge hole that will exceed 11,100 meters deep.
Work started last week on taklamakanthe second largest dune desert in the world, located in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, in the northwest of the country.
The hole will go through more than 10 continental strata and reach layers dating back to the planet’s Cretaceous period, between 145 and 66 million years ago, the state news agency Xinhua reported.
The project has an expected duration of 457 days in which the operators will handle more than 2,000 tons of equipment and machinery.
An ambitious initiative
This is the largest excavation project in China, which will break the 10,000-meter barrier with a well for the first time.
The hole that China drills will not, however, be the deepest man-made.
That record is held by the Kola super-deep drilling well in Russia, whose excavation lasted for almost two decades until it reached 12,262 meters in 1989.
China’s initiative comes at a time when this country is taking important steps in its consolidation as a global technological and scientific power.
Interestingly, the same day that work on the new well began, Beijing sent three astronauts to its orbital space station as part of its project to set foot on the Moon before 2030.
But why drill a hole deeper than the height of Everest and close to the maximum flight altitude of a commercial airliner?
the two purposes
The state petrochemical corporation Sinopec, which is leading the project, said its goal of “extending the limits of depth” in geological exploration.
Work to drill the deepest hole in China has begun two years after the country’s president, Xi Jinping, urged the local scientific community to advance in exploring the depths of the earth’s crust.
“The drilling of the well has two purposes: scientific research and finding gas and oil”said Lyu Xiaogang, a representative of the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), the country’s largest oil and gas company and one of the largest in the world.
In an explanatory video, the official assures that the project will serve to strengthen the technological capabilities of PetroChina (the business giant controlled by CNPC that is listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange) in deep excavations and manufacture of new machinery.
“To study the 10 kilometers closest to the surface, we usually use other techniques such as seismic tomography and other types. These types of projects are very useful because they provide physical evidence to support this investigation,” Chilean geophysicist Cristian Farías explained to BBC Mundo. Director of Civil Works and Geology at the Catholic University of Temuco.
In addition, he assures, the China project “allows us to test the most innovative technological advances”, for which reason “It can open a very interesting period of exploration”.
gas and oil
Regarding the second objective, CNPC indicated that it is exploring new ultra-deep oil and gas fields in the northwest of the Asian country.
Hydrocarbon deposits at extreme depths of the subsoil -generally below 5,000 meters- are usually located in marine areas, such as the oceans, where the rock and sediment layers are thicker, although they are also found in certain terrestrial areas, such as basins. deep sedimentary.
This is the case of the Tarim basin, where the Taklamakan desert is located, it can host large reserves of oil and natural gas.
However, its exploitation presents, according to experts, significant technical and technological challenges due to the difficult subsoil conditions, such as high pressure and extreme temperatures.
“And the stability of that hole is also a great challenge,” says Professor Farías
Although the former Soviet Union managed to exceed 12 kilometers deep, Experts say that reaching such low levels of the earth’s crust is still something extremely complex today.
“The construction difficulty of this drilling project is like driving a big truck on two thin steel cables,” Sun Jinsheng, a scientist at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, told Xinhua news agency.
In addition, the Taklamakan Desert is considered difficult territory to work in, with extreme temperatures dropping as low as -20ºC in winter and rising to almost 40ºC in summer. c
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-internacional-65816984, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-06-05 22:20:06
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