China has discovered 100 million tons of rare earth oil fields, why is the United States not calm?
With the advent of the second industrial revolution, oil has gradually become the main source of energy for mankind**. Due to its abundant reserves, easy to use, high calorific value and high added value, oil is known as the "blood of industry".
It can be said that oil supports almost half of modern civilization. Our clothing (petroleum chemical fiber), diet (petroleum agriculture), and daily necessities (plastic products) are all closely related to petroleum.
The distribution of oil resources is extremely uneven in the world, and the United States has grasped the global oil pricing power through war and other means, pegging oil to the US dollar, forming a "petrodollar hegemony" and becoming an important tool for them to plunder the world.
For a long time, developing countries represented by China have suffered greatly, but they have no choice but to rely on the strong power of the United States. However, in recent years, the oil workers in China have braved the difficulties and worked hard to exploit them, so that China has a 100-million-ton "rare earth oil field", which makes the United States feel uneasy, and other countries have followed suit.
Unconventional oil – heavy oil"This oil reserve is huge, accounting for 70% of the world's remaining reserves, and is known as the best replacement resource for general oil. Heavy oils are extremely viscous and contain a variety of high-density hydrocarbons and heterocyclic non-hydrocarbon compounds, usually with a density greater than 1 gram centimeter.
Scholars have likened it to "paste", "butter" or "brown sugar cubes" that require complex processing before they can be used.
Naphthenic heavy oil is like a pearl in the heavy oil family, because of its unique chemical properties, it can produce many high-quality chemical products, and even become the key raw material of important national products such as rocket propellants, so it is known as a national strategic resource.
Globally, due to the differences in the properties of heavy oils in various places, heavy oils can be roughly divided into three categories: paraffin-based heavy oil, intermediate-based heavy oil and naphthenic heavy oil. Among them, naphthenic heavy oil accounts for only 22%, known as the "rare treasure" in oil.
In the global heavy oil reserves, high-quality resources with naphthenic content of more than 50% account for only 015%, its rarity is comparable to that of the "giant panda in oil". The naphthenic content of heavy oil in the United States, Canada and other countries is about 32%, the naphthenic content in Venezuela's high-quality heavy oil is about 53%, and the naphthenic content of heavy oil in Bohai Bay in China is between 30% and 46%.
For a long time, China has been dependent on imported naphthene raw materials and has been constrained by Western countries. In 1958, a large number of heavy oil reserves were discovered in the Fengcheng Oilfield in Xinjiang, China, however, there has been controversy at home and abroad about the value attribute of heavy oil in Xinjiang Oilfield.
These oils occur in low-grade reservoirs, which contain many disadvantages such as high viscosity, low abundance, strong heterogeneity and low energy, which are extremely difficult to exploit and quench. The refined oil has more impurities and is classified as the most cheap and inferior oil.
Therefore, from the point of view of general economic value, the cost performance of extracting these heavy oils is not high, and it is better to directly import high-quality oil from the Middle East. However, there are two sides to everything.
Heavy oil in Xinjiang has special advantages that other types of heavy oil do not have. Compared with foreign oilfields, the naphthenic content of heavy oil in Xinjiang oilfield is as high as 69 on average7% is well-deserved "the best of them" and "the jewel in the crown".
2. China has successfully created a 10,000-ton "rare earth" oilfield, although Xinjiang has large heavy oil reserves, but it has high viscosity and low grade, and it is extremely difficult to exploit. The existing methods of heavy oil extraction mainly include the fire layer method and the chemical viscosity reduction method, but the former is difficult to control underground combustion, and the latter is easy to pollute groundwater, so these two schemes are not suitable for the exploitation of heavy oil in Xinjiang.
Since 1994, China has been trying to exploit the heavy oil from the Fengcheng Oilfield in Xinjiang in a new way, and has sought the help of international teams such as Canada, but all of them have failed, and they have even called it a "development forbidden zone".
In the face of such a difficult task, Xinjiang Oilfield has been self-reliant since 1996, cooperating with PetroChina Research Institute and other institutions, and with the support of the state, it has created 14 pilot test areas, gathering more than 1,600 field experts from all over the country to work together.
In the end, with the joint efforts of everyone, our scientific research team has successfully solved a number of world-class problems, established a complete theoretical and technical system for the efficient development of shallow heavy oil and ultra-heavy oil, and independently developed four key new technologies for heavy oil thermal recovery, including practical strong heterogeneous ultra-heavy oil double-level well SAGD, multiphase synergistic steam injection development, steam injection tailings high-temperature fire flooding, efficient treatment and resource utilization of produced liquid.
Driven by relevant technologies, the high-quality heavy oil in our Xinjiang oilfield has been exploited on a large scale, contributing to national construction and rejuvenating hundreds of millions of tons of ultra-heavy oil resources.
In 2019, we built the largest production base of high-quality naphthenic heavy oil in Xinjiang in China. According to the data of PetroChina Xinjiang Oilfield Company, as of August 2020, the cumulative heavy oil production of PetroChina Xinjiang Oilfield Company has exceeded 100 million tons, and the new recoverable reserves have exceeded 200 million tons, occupying more than 90% of the national market share, and has the basic advantages of stable production for 20 years.
This marks that since the last century, 80% of our high-quality naphthenic heavy oil has relied on imports, and the embarrassing situation of exploitation technology being controlled by others has been completely broken.
China has widely applied the latest technology and successfully realized the large-scale and stable development of heavy oil resources, which has played an important role in ensuring China's energy security. In particular, those high-quality "petroleum rare earths" are known as the "great powers" in the energy treasure house.
In 2021, China Oil and Gas Group discovered a large shale oil field with reserves of nearly 1 billion tons in the Ordos Basin, which is a great news in China's energy field.
It is worth mentioning that in the period of change when the global energy pattern is accelerating, China's new energy development and utilization has really come to the forefront of the world and occupied the high ground of the times.
In our country, the development of high-quality heavy oil resources has yielded remarkable results, while combustible ice mining and controlled nuclear fusion projects are gaining traction around the world.
Especially in the field of controlled nuclear fusion, Chinese scientists have made a major breakthrough in the engineering technology of "artificial sun". According to the latest data, in January 2022, the running time of the ESAT device of the Chinese Academy of Sciences exceeded 1,000 seconds for the first time, reaching 1,056 seconds, an achievement that leads the world.
If this project can be successfully realized, then mankind can harness the huge energy generated by nuclear fusion, and there will be an almost endless supply of clean energy on the earth, and it may even change the course of human civilization.
With the continuous progress of science and technology and the improvement of the comprehensive national strength of all countries, the world's energy pattern is changing. After World War II, the United States controlled the hegemony of the world oil system for a long time by virtue of its strong comprehensive national strength.
However, U.S. oil production has not met expectations because oil resources in the United States are mainly in the form of shale oil and cannot be effectively extracted under past technical conditions.
This is changing.
New copywriting: U.S. scientists have made major breakthroughs in recent years, using new technologies such as hydraulic fracturing to unlock shale oil resources. This has allowed the United States to surpass Saudi Arabia and Russia in oil reserves to become the world's largest oil producer.
In terms of actual production, the U.S. is just as good. According to the data, U.S. ** production is expected to reach 11.97 million barrels per day in 2022, and may even reach 12.6 million barrels per day in 2030.
However, the demand for oil consumption in the United States is also huge, with an estimated 20.66 million barrels of oil per day consumed in 2022.
As a result, the Americans still control the world's main strategic oil transportation corridors and have a significant influence on the Middle East's oil-producing countries. Although the United States has faced several challenges in recent years, such as Saudi Arabia's war against US shale oil in 2016, the US global oil hegemony remains solid.
In addition, oil hegemony is also an important cornerstone of the US economic hegemony system. In March 1971, Nixon of the United States, immediately after reaching an agreement with the members of the General Treasury, announced that he would no longer pay $35 per ounce to the world
How to ensure reserve currency status. In 1974, the United States successfully persuaded Saudi Arabia to accept the U.S. dollar as the sole denomination and settlement currency for oil exports, using advanced security as a bargaining chip.
Subsequently, other OPEC members also accepted this rule, resulting in a system of "petrodollar hegemony" that allowed the dollar to dominate the world's reserve currency.
Under the shadow of "petrodollar hegemony", many oil-importing countries, such as China, must have enough dollars to buy oil. In order to ensure the steady development of the country's economy and society, every country needs to reserve a certain amount of foreign exchange, especially the US dollar.
The United States has taken advantage of this unfair rule to continuously strengthen the hegemony of the dollar, and has long enjoyed the advantages of the dollar as a global currency. In order to break the energy hegemony of the United States and promote the development of the world energy system in a more fair and just direction, China has taken a variety of measures and comprehensive policies.
China continues to make new breakthroughs in its oil reserves, which, according to international standards, need to be able to meet the needs of a country for 90 days without external ** to ensure security.
At present, China's dependence on foreign oil has exceeded 70%, but there has been uncertainty and speculation in terms of strategic reserves. Some foreign agencies estimate that China's oil reserves are between 50-70 days.
In April 2019, the National Bureau of Statistics released data showing that China's ** surplus tripled year-on-year to 1.79 million barrels per day, but the exact amount of reserves was not disclosed.
As early as the beginning of the 21 st century, China made clear the lofty goal of strategic oil reserves. In recent years, as China's economic influence in the world has grown, our companies have begun to invest and acquire large-scale oil and gas fields on a large scale around the world.
Some of these precious oil and gas resources will be included in China's strategic oil reserves. In the future, with the advancement of the internationalization of the RMB and the weakening of the "petrodollar hegemony", our international energy cooperation will be vigorously developed.
At the same time, domestic oil workers continue to discover new 100-million-ton oil fields and constantly overcome the problems of oil exploitation, which will promote China's oil reserves to achieve a great leap forward, which is of great significance for ensuring China's energy security and economic and social stability.
China is making new breakthroughs in the development and utilization of new energy, thanks to its great progress in clean and renewable energy such as solar, wind and hydropower.
According to the International Energy Development Agency's Global Energy Review 2021 released last year, global energy demand is expected to grow by 4 percent in 20216%, and China is particularly prominent in this.
It is expected that by 2030, China will surpass the United States and become the most technologically advanced country in the world in nuclear power. In addition, Chinese scientists also plan to build megawatts of space solar power stations in space by 2030, which will make China the first country in the world to master the construction technology of practical space solar power stations, and dominate the world's energy **.
China's performance in the fields of oil exploration, extraction and refining is impressive. What was once an apprentice and follower is now a true leader. Taking Xinjiang heavy oil as an example, China has developed six extraction and refining technologies, including steam huff and puff, steam flooding, gravity drainage, and displacement and discharge compounding.
The successful implementation of this technology has led to a continuous and steady increase in oil production in the oilfield, and the recovery rate of heavy oil in China has exceeded 65%, which is 20 percentage points higher than that of developed countries such as the United States and Canada, leading the world peers.
Adhering to the lofty concept of "reaching the world and helping the world", this technology has gone to the world. With the promotion of the "Belt and Road" in the world, this technology has been successfully applied in foreign oil fields such as Canada, Kazakhstan and Venezuela, laying a solid technical foundation for the "Belt and Road" oil development cooperation, bringing benefits to all mankind and demonstrating China's strength and friendliness in the new era.
Oil is an important guarantee of a country's hard power and is crucial to a country's industrialization. Kissinger once said, "Whoever controls oil holds global power." ”
This view fully demonstrates the important role of oil in international relations. In 1953, our beloved *** and *** met with Comrade Li Siguang, a famous geologist who was the Minister of Geology at that time, in the Zhongnanhai meeting room.
During the conversation, ** expressed deep concern: "To carry out construction, oil is indispensable. Whether it is flying in the sky or running on the ground, it cannot function properly without oil. ”
In the context of this era, the oil workers represented by the iron man Comrade Wang Jinxi, with the firm determination of "willing to sacrifice 20 years to find a big oil field", have unearthed rich oil resources for the motherland and become the pillar supporting the industrialization of the Chinese nation.
Although China's economic development is rapid, our country's oil resources are still in short supply, and the international oil resources supply and demand competition and negotiations are still fierce. Under these circumstances, the new generation of oil workers inherited and carried forward the heroic and fearless spirit of the older generation, and struggled to find treasures for the motherland in difficult circumstances.
The discovery of the 100-million-ton "rare earth" oil field this time is undoubtedly a blessing for our country, and has injected confidence and strength into us to bravely face the threats and challenges of the United States and realize national rejuvenation and world harmony.
Finally, let us once again pay tribute to the oil workers and all the laborers who have dedicated themselves to the motherland!
Below are our references, which provide us with valuable research materials and ideas. Zhang Tingting, Wang Dehua et al.'s "The Belt and Road Initiative and China's Petroleum Reserves: A Study on Energy Cooperation between China and the Six Gulf Countries" provides an important reference for us to understand the cooperation between China and the Gulf countries in oil reserves.
Yan Hai and Sun Jiayang's research "Research on China's Petroleum Reserve System - Discussion of the National Petroleum Reserve Regulations (Draft for Comments)" helps us understand the policy trend of China's oil reserve system.
Huang Sheng, He Yuchu and Li Zhenyu's research "Some Thoughts on the Development of Xinjiang's Petroleum and Chemical Industry under the New Situation of the Belt and Road Initiative" provides us with new insights into the development prospects of Xinjiang's petroleum and chemical industry.
Zeng Zhonglin and Shu Xianlin's research "Sino-US Oil Security Interaction and Foreign Strategy Comparison: On Sino-US Petroleum Cooperation from the Perspective of "Harmonious World" allows us to see the interaction between China and the United States in oil security.
Finally, Chen Do's interview "Strategic Petroleum Reserve Progress is a Bit Slow: An Interview with Huang Xiaoyong, Dean of the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Director of the Center for International Energy Security", gives us an insight into China's latest progress in strategic oil reserves.