The Shendi Take 1 drilling site in Xinjiang, China, in May 2023 Xinhua/Shutterstock
This year, the China National Petroleum Corporation started drilling what will be the deepest hole in China and be among the deepest holes in the world, in the north-western province of Xinjiang.
An announcement in May from China’s state-run news agency Xinhua said the project was “an unprecedented opportunity to study areas of the planet deep beneath the surface”, drilling down more than 11,000 metres into the billion-year-old strata of the remote Taklamakan desert.
The project’s more prosaic aim is to identify new reserves of…
