Talk about chasing the deep ball..Chinese state oil company Sinopec began drilling in Xinjiang province where it hopes to drill Asia’s — and indeed, one of the world’s — deepest oil wells.. Deepest oil well .Located in the Shaya County of Aksu Prefecture by the edge of the Taklamakan Desert, the well has a projected total vertical depth of 9,472 metres, or nearly 32,000 feet, with a 3,400 metre horizontal section..To put it into perspective, that’s about 624 metres deeper than Everest is tall. The world’s first oil well — the Drake well in Cherrytree Township, Penn. — was 69 feet deep, or roughly 21 metres..Sinopec expects to reach total depth in Carboniferous strata in just 21 days, which would be a world record..In a news release worthy of Soviet-era propaganda, Sinopec touted the hole as “a breakthrough of milestone significance in China's ultra-deep oil and gas exploration, which now has world-leading technological and equipment capabilities.”.Anything with a depth of over 9,000 metres — vertical or otherwise — is defined as ultra-deep. Although similar ultra-deep shots are considered common in the deep ocean, they’re a little more rare on land because they need powerful top drive motors that were once only found on offshore rigs..And harder to actually drill due to high temperatures, pressures that can cause blowouts and toxic hydrogen sulphide levels. The deeper you drill, the higher those go; temperatures at that depth can easily exceed 180 C. .That’s in addition to complex geological formations that can trap expensive drilling equipment downhole. Or collapse in on themselves..But through its self-developed rotary geo-steerable drilling system and the high-temperature and high-pressure logging equipment, Sinopec said it has achieved leapfrog development of fast drilling in high precision. .As of now, the Shunbei oil and gas field of the Shendi-1 Project has 49 oil and gas wells that are deeper than 8,000 meters, and multiple wells have set new Asian records..But it still won’t be the deepest well in the world. That record goes to the Bertha Rogers No. 1 which was drilled in 1974 in the Anadarko Basin of Oklahoma. The Lone Star Producing Company had to abandon the hole after it hit 31,441 feet — about 350 feet deeper than Sinopec’s — after hitting a pool of liquid sulphur. .It took more than 16 months to drill. The company later estimated bottom hole pressures of 24,850 pounds per square inch and temperatures of 475 F. According to the Anadarko Oil and Gas Historical Society, it took about eight hours for bottom hole cuttings — the chunks of rocks chewed up by the drill bit — to recirculate back to surface.. Horizontal drilling .The deepest well in absolute terms is BP’s Tiber well, which was drilled by the infamous Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico in 2009, reaching a total depth of 35,055 feet..That’s not even the deepest well ever drilled, however. In 1995 Russia abandoned the Soviet-era Superdeep Kola Borehole near Norway after it reached 40,230 feet because it had actually reached “Hell” itself. After it pierced an extremely hot cavity and scientists thought they heard the screams of “damned souls” on logging equipment.. Kola Superdeep Borehole .Although it wasn’t an oil well, the Kola hole was the first to confirm the presence of life in Precambrian strata..Finding the deepest true vertical well in Canada is a bit trickier to come by, given that almost all are directional. The longest well in Canada is about 8,500 metres, drilled by an undisclosed operator in 2022, but it had a horizontal section of 4,000 metres, which means it had a vertical depth of about 14,750 feet.
