China is drilling another 10000-meter hole in the ground

Digital Desk: China has started drilling a 10,000-meter hole in the ground for the second time this year to find natural gas reserves that are extremely deep. According to Xinhua News Agency, China National Petroleum Corp started drilling the Shendi Chuanke 1 Well in Sichuan province on Thursday. The well has a depth of 10,520 meters (6.5 miles).

The initiative comes after CNPC started drilling a well of comparable size in Xinjiang in May. At the time, this was the deepest drilling operation ever carried out in China.

According to Xinhua, the Sichuan project is looking for ultra-deep natural gas reserves. The earlier well was defined as experimental, with the effort aiming to test drilling methods and gather data on the Earth's interior structure.

Sichuan, a province in China's southeast known for its hot food, breathtaking mountain scenery, and panda population, also has some of the country's greatest shale gas deposits. 

However, due to challenging terrain and complex subterranean geology, the nation's state-owned oil companies have had only patchy success in realizing their promise.

In recent years, China's government has put pressure on energy businesses to increase local output in order to improve fuel security in the face of a number of power outages, political instability, and fluctuating global oil prices.