In the city of Daqing in Heilongjiang Province, China, in the biting cold, the oil pumps are tirelessly moving back and forth. Recently, China Petroleum's Daqing Gulong Terrestrial Shale Oil National Demonstration Zone has achieved a production volume of over 1 million tons per year, realizing the large-scale and efficient exploitation of shale oil.
In the national demonstration area of the Guanglong Terrestrial Shale Oil, staff members showed journalists the shale oil in bottles, where the light yellowish shale oil contrasted sharply with the blackish brown of the conventional crude oil from Daqing. Shale, named for its flat layers resembling boards and its ease of cracking into sheet-like "book pages" in the vertical direction, contains shale oil as an important strategic replacement resource, with advantages such as wide distribution, great potential, and reserves far exceeding conventional oil and gas.
As China's largest oilfield on land, the Daqing Oilfield has produced more than 2.5 billion tons of crude oil. After decades of high and stable production, the Daqing Oilfield started the construction of the national-level Gu Long Terrestrial Shale Oil Demonstration Zone in 2021, and listed the exploration and development of Gu Long shale oil as the "No.1 Project", opening up a new battlefield in the field of unconventional oil and gas.
The development journey of this precious resource began in a recognized "no man's land" — the Gu Long shale oil, as a typical example of stratigraphic shale oil, is far more difficult to develop than other types of shale oil in North America and China. Several international oil companies that have visited have previously deemed it difficult to achieve economic development.
What broke the cognitive barrier was an exploration well named "Guyeyouping 1 Well". Chen Lin, the executive deputy commander of the Shale Oil Exploration and Development Headquarters of Daqing Oilfield, said that it took them 108 days to overcome the problems of "easy collapse, easy leakage, and easy pipe sticking" in the Qingshankou Formation shale. After a 163 - day "silent period" of oil testing, they finally obtained industrial oil and gas flows in June 2020. Since this well is located in the Gulong Sag, "Gulong shale oil" got its name.
Since then, the exploration and development of the Gu Long shale oil has been on a "fast track". After the National Energy Administration approved the establishment of a national demonstration zone in 2021, China National Petroleum Corporation has provided special investment and technological support, and Heilongjiang Province and Daqing City have introduced supporting policies. In Zhao Yuan County, the core area of Gu Long shale oil development, 18 oil service companies have successively settled down, forming a complete industrial chain; Daqing City has planned and promoted the deep integration of shale oil development with local industries, driving the upgrading of petrochemicals, equipment manufacturing and other industries.
It is understood that during the five years of exploration and development of Gulong shale oil, the full-life cycle output of a single well increased from 11,000 tons to 32,000 tons. In 2021, when the demonstration zone was launched, the annual output was only 15,000 tons, and in 2025, the output exceeded 1 million tons. A historic leap was achieved from "oil generation" in continental shale to "oil production", marking a crucial step in the large-scale development of mud-striped shale oil.
Cui Baowen, a technical consultant to the Daqing Oilfield, said the oilfield has proposed and confirmed the major theoretical breakthrough that "shale can also produce oil", which will bring great changes to China's oil and gas resources prospects, not only in the Songliao Basin, but also in other similar basins across the country, where oil and gas resources will also increase on a large scale.
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