THE country has started to drill an 8,875-meter-deep well in southwestern Sichuan Province to explore an untapped underground oil and gas field, sources with Sinopec Corp. said Saturday.

With an estimated investment of 300 million yuan (US$38.8 million), the drilling of the well, named “Chuanke No.1 Well,” started in Mianzhu City on March 20 and is expected to take 676 days to finish.

Zhang Xiaopeng, deputy chief engineer of Sinopec’s Southwest China oil and gas company, said that by drilling the well, Chinese scientists hope to learn more about the distribution of oil and natural gas in “ultra-deep stratum,” which geologists refer to as stratum deeper than 7,000 meters.

Last April, Sinopec announced the discovery of the 356-billion-cubic-meter Puguang Gas Field in northeastern Sichuan, the largest gas field ever found in China.

In July, 2006, China completed drilling of the “Tashen No. 1 well,” which is 8,408 meters deep, in Tahe oilfield in Northwest China’s Tarim Basin and used to be Asia’s deepest, but did not discover gas.

(Xinhua)