China’s state-owned news agency, Xinhua, says the production of gas in north China’s Shanxi Province increased 5.7% to 6.82 billion cubic metres in the first half of 2023, setting a new record for the major coal region.
Shanxi has prolific resources of unconventional gas and activities including coal bed methane, tight sandstone and shale gas and by the end of 2020 had declared a total proven geological unconventional gas reserve of 1.06 Tcf.
Xinhua said that Shanxi’s rise in unconventional gas production had risen from 8.15 Bcm in 2020 to 11.33 Bcf in 2022 and annual average growth was nearly 1.6 Bcf.
In a separate report, Xinhua said Chinese engineers had broken new ground on a super new drillhole that would reach 10,520m at the Sichuan Basin in southwest China in the search for gas reserves.
This was announced just a few weeks after China began drilling an even deeper well to a planned depth of 11,100m in at the Tarim Basin in the northwest autonomous region of Xinjiang.
Should both wells reach target depths, they will be two of the deepest in the world, but not deeper than the Kola well in north-west Russia that took 20-years to complete and reached 12,262m.
