China has decided to lead the scientific exploration of the depths of our planet. And as usual, the Asian giant has decided to do things big, and quickly. The China National Petroleum Corporation, the state oil company responsible for the project, announced in recent weeks that the Shendi Take-1 well has exceeded 9,850 meters in length, and is therefore preparing to reach the goal of 10 kilometers of depth, which they will make one of the deepest wells ever dug by man. Not the deepest (although it is very close) therefore, but in this case the impressive thing is the time: drilling, in fact, began in June 2023.
The project is being carried out in the Xinjiang region, in the North West of the country, within the Tarim basin, a desert area that hosts more than 60% of China’s deep oil and natural gas deposits. The intent of the Shendi Take-1 project is therefore twofold: on the one hand, prospecting of the deepest areas of the region, to verify the presence of deposits and the possibility of exploiting them; on the other, to explore the deep areas of the earth’s crust, where the rocks date back to around 145 million years ago and have never come into contact with the planet’s atmosphere, and to develop new technologies for the exploration of the earth’s depths .
The excavation was carried out using the most advanced Chinese drilling structure, capable of drilling lengths of 12 kilometers. To reach the 10 kilometers of depth, the project had to use 26 drill bits, 12 of which in the first 8 kilometers of excavation, and 14 for the last two: the temperatures and enormous pressures that characterize the innermost areas of the Earth, in fact, shorten the operational life of a tip from about 2 kilometers to just over 140 meters.
At the end of the excavation, the Shendi Take-1 well should measure 11,100 meters deep. Among the deepest ever made, therefore, but not the deepest: first place still remains in the hands of the Soviet Kola well, dug starting in the 1970s on the peninsula of the same name, and reaching a depth of 12,262 metres. In the case of Kola, the works took over 20 years, and were interrupted with the breakup of the Soviet Union. The Chinese well took less than a year to reach a depth of 10 kilometers, and this says a lot about the opportunities for studying the depths of the earth that will be opened up by the technological innovations of recent years.