Chinese Researchers plan to develop a drilling rig capable of boring a hole 15,000 meters deep, following up on the success of a homegrown rig that reached 7,018 meters in May, according to Thursday's China Daily.
The development of the new rig will be based on knowledge gained from the Crust-1 10K ultradeep scientific rig, currently the best China has developed, the newspaper quoted Sun Youhong, vice-president of Jilin University and the research and development director of the deep continental scientific drilling equipment program, as saying.
Crust-1, which belongs to the Songke 2 project and was designed to bore 10,000 meters into the earth, showed its capability in Anda, northeast China's Heilongjiang province, on May 26, when it penetrated the Cretaceous continental strata and drilled the deepest borehole for scientific purposes completed by an Asian country.
While listing high temperatures, high pressures and high stress in the earth's crust as the daunting problems researchers will face, Sun said a deep borehole drilled by the future rig could be used as a permanent underground observation station, which is believed to be able to "greatly improve our ability to warn of major natural disasters early."
The Songke 2 project, which drilled to a depth of 7,018 meters in the Songliao Basin last month, made China the third country to develop a rig capable of hitting 10,000-meters, after Germany and Russia.
An initial design for the new drilling rig, the Crust-2, has been completed and awaits approval.