China’s state-run Global Times on Thursday boasted that oil giant Sinopec’s new shale gas well drilling facility broke two domestic records for its 14,062-foot horizontal expanse. The immense facility is expected to give a “strong boost” to shale gas production.
Shale gas is difficult to access without digging very long tunnels horizontally through the earth, slipping between geologic layers to access the gas pockets. Vertical drilling cannot fully exploit these buried pockets because the shafts would hit rocky obstructions that are very difficult to penetrate without ruining the operation. Also, gas pockets are sometimes located beneath terrain that would be difficult to build a facility on, so drilling horizontally is necessary to reach them.
As the Global Times proudly noted, drilling “ultra-long horizontal wells” of over 3,000 meters is a considerable engineering challenge, since the walls of such a long tunnel are prone to collapsing. The effort was deemed worthwhile to reach the reserves of over 900 billion cubic meters in China’s southwestern Fuling district.
The Global Times praised the well for delivering “clean energy to more than 70 cities along the Yangtze River Economic Belt, benefiting more than 1,000 enterprises and nearly 200 million residents.”
Sinopec is China’s largest shale gas producer, thanks in good measure to the Fuling field, which provided 31% of China’s total shale gas supply last year.
The current record holder for the world’s longest horizontally-drilled well is the Maersk Oil Qatar well in the Shaheen offshore field, completed in 2008, which is 35,770 feet long.
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