China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation, also known as Sinopec, made a major natural gas discovery at the Zhongjiang gas field in China's Sichuan province, Oilprice.com reported, citing Reuters.
An exploration well drilled by Sinopec's northwest China unit attained a daily flow of 6,315 barrels of crude oil and 590,000 cubic meters of natural gas, the state-owned oil and gas major said on Weibo, a Twitter-like microblogging platform.
An sandstone gas reservoir, the Zhongjiang field has low porosity and permeability and strong concealment. The field's primary gas reservoir is 2,000-3,000 meters deep covering 405 square kilometers. Sinopec is expected to have discovered more than 100 million tons of hydrocarbons, according to Zacks Equity Research.
So far, the Zhongjiang gas field has generated nearly 5.3 billion cubic meters of natural gas. For two straight years, the field produced more than 1 billion cubic meters of natural gas a year, which is equivalent to 5.5 million homes' daily gas usage, Sinopec said.
The newly discovered gas reservoir is in a so-called legacy-generating area in the Tarim Basin. It's also where Shunbei Field is located, which produced around 1 million tons of crude oil in 2020 -- an increase of 30% compared to the previous year -- and 50 million cubic meters of gas, up 33% on the year.
Over the last few years, Sinopec resolved three major obstacles in gas and oil exploration, which include narrow-channel gas fields, high-sulfur ultra-deep gas and shale gas fields.
China emerged as among the few nations to master the exploration and development of large ultra-deep gas fields as a result. Sinopec claimed the latest find will help establish the country's first 100 billion cubic meters natural gas output base.
A large volume of China's energy is sourced from coal-fired power facilities, which produce greenhouse gases that causes pollution. To solve this problem, the government is ramping up its natural gas consumption.
CNPC, another Chinese energy company, announced earlier this week a new find at the Daqing Field cluster, which is one of the largest oil production facilities in China. The latest reservoir is in a shale formation and has nearly 1.3 billion tons of oil.
