PetroChina, one of the Asian country's biggest oil companies, recently finished drilling an 8,882-metre deep well at the Tarim oilfield in north-western China, Global Times reported. The drilling process took the company a year due to the geological complexity of the region.
The well, named Luntan One, has thereby beaten the record set by Sinopec, which drilled an 8,588-metre deep well earlier this year at the same oilfield. What the two sites have in common is that both wells are basically as deep as Mount Everest is high.
"We've basically drilled Mt. Everest, just underground", PetroChina's exploration division manager, Qiu Bin, said.
The Tarim oilfield is the largest of its kind in China, but it poses tough challenges to those that drill there, such as high temperatures and high pressure conditions.