Sinopec discovers shale oil in East China Shengli Oilfield
Sinopec announced the discovery of over 140 million tons of proven geological reserves of shale oil with technically recoverable reserves of 11.3599 million tons at its Shengli Oilfield’s Jiyang shale oil national demonstration zone in East China’s Shandong province on 24 March 2025. This is the first shale oil field with proven geological reserves of over 100 million tonnes that has been certificated by China’s Ministry of Natural Resources.
Shengli Oilfield has developed advanced automated drilling equipment that extracts efficiently, and explored horizontal well optimization and fast drilling technology, and dense cutting combined seam network volume fracturing technology. The average drilling cycle has been reduced from 133 days to 29.5 days, and the drilling cycle of 6,000-m wells has reached 17.7 days, and the single well production capacity has continued to set new records.
“Through 150,000 times of indoor experiments, we developed the theory of shale oil enrichment in continental fault lake basins, reshaping the traditional common understanding that shale oil can only be enriched and mobilized when its maturity is higher than 0.9%,” said Liu Huimin, Vice President and Chief Geologist of Sinopec Shengli Oilfield Branch. “With the support of this theory, the amount of shale oil resources in Jiyang has tripled after re-evaluation.”
Shengli Oilfield has tackled challenges of high temperature, pressure, and leakage in shale oil development. By advancing reserve-fracture-pressure theories, developing full-cycle 3D technologies, and building an integrated geological engineering platform, it expanded shale oil development from three to seven layers, addressing extraction efficiency and maximizing resource recovery.
Sun Yongzhuang, Assistant to President of Sinopec Group and Managing Director of Shengli Petroleum Administration Bureau Co., said estimated shale oil resources in Shengli Oilfield have reached 10.5 billion tons, equivalent to the conventional oil and gas resources recovered during the past 60 years in China.
In January 2021, the Company tested a high-yield shale oil and gas well at the Fuling shale gas field in Chongqing, with shale oil production surpassing 30,000 tons for the first time in 2024. By December 2021, Sinopec identified a favorable area of 420 sq km in the Qintong Depression of the Northern Jiangsu Basin, with shale oil resources totaling 350 million tonnes. In July 2022, a Northern Jiangsu Basin well yielded more than 30 tonnes of oil and 1,500 cu m of natural gas daily, activating 1.1 billion tons of shale oil resources.
