China drilling second 10,000-metre-deep hole for gas

China has begun drilling a 10,000-metre hole in the ground for the second time this year to extract natural gas as it suffers an increasingly common global dilemma where climate change enforces investment in climate-averse projects, Bloomberg reported.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has vehemently pledged green economy investments and energy transition in the world's second largest economy is real, proceeding at a rapid pace, according to a Reuters report.

However, the country also seeks alternative energy sources to make up for the sudden disruptions in massive hydro and solar power productions caused by the debilitating impact of climate events like drought and arbitrary rain patterns.

The phenomenon is not limited to China alone. Earlier this year, the UK attempted to go coal-free. But an increased need for air conditioning, thanks to the unprecedented heat waves, forced the usually temperate country to reverse itself and restart an old coal-fired power plant — after only 46 days of shutting it down.

China National Petroleum Corp on Thursday began drilling the Shendi Chuanke 1 Well in Sichuan province, with a designed depth of 10,520 metres (6.5 miles), Xinhua News Agency reported. The project follows a similar-sized well that CNPC began drilling in Xinjiang in May, described at the time as the deepest ever undertaken in China.

While the earlier well was described as experimental in nature, with the project designed to test drilling technologies and provide data on the Earth's internal structure, the Sichuan undertaking is seeking to find ultra-deep reserves of natural gas, according to Xinhua.

Sichuan, the southeastern province known for spicy food, spectacular mountain views and pandas, is also home to some of China's largest shale gas reserves. The nation's state-owned oil giants have had only limited success tapping their potential, though, because of difficult terrain and complicated underground geology.

In the May drilling project, a narrow shaft into the ground will penetrate more than 10 continental strata, or layers of rock, and reach the cretaceous system in the Earth's crust, which features rock dating back some 145 million years. The drilling is expected to take 457 days.

"The construction difficulty of the drilling project can be compared to a big truck driving on two thin steel cables," Sun Jinsheng, a scientist at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, had told Xinhua.

The deepest man-made hole on Earth is still the Russian Kola Superdeep Borehole, which reached a depth of 12,262 metres (40,230 feet) in 1989, after 20 years of drilling.

China's government has put pressure on energy companies in recent years to enhance fuel security by boosting domestic production amid a series of power shortages, geopolitical strife and global price volatility.

Hydro generation slumped by 132 billion kWh in the first half of 2023 from the previous year logging a huge 23% fall. The output was also the lowest for eight years as a protracted drought hit reservoir levels in southwestern provinces of Sichuan and Yunnan.

In the 12 months since the middle of 2022, rainfall was just half the average over the previous eight years and down by almost 60% compared with the previous 12-month period.

Some of the power deficit caused by hydro generation in the first half of this year was covered by increased generation from wind farms (+82 billion kWh) and solar power (+25 billion kWh).

But the rest of the deficit and all the consumption growth was covered by a massive increase in thermal generation (+218 billion kWh) mostly from coal-fired units.

As such, power production still increased by 5.2%, which implies the government is probably on track to meet its declared target of around 5% for growth in gross domestic product this year.