China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) announced on Thursday the discovery of a high-production well at an oil and gas field in the Beibu Gulf in the South China Sea, marking a significant milestone in the region's oil and gas exploration.
The Weizhou 10-5 oil and gas field is located about 75 kilometers off the coast of Beihai City in southwest China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, with an average water depth of approximately 37 meters.
The exploration well reached a depth of nearly 5,000 meters underwater, encountering an oil and gas reservoir that is 283 meters thick.
Test results indicate that the well is capable of producing approximately 370,000 cubic meters of natural gas and about 102 tons of crude oil daily.
"The Weixinan Depression is the most oil- and gas-rich depression in the Beibu Gulf Basin. Drilling in fracture belts in the vicinity of the depression, where conditions for oil and gas formation are most favorable, is expected to lead to significant exploration breakthroughs," said Fan Caiwei, director of the South China Sea West Petroleum Research Institute at CNOOC's Zhanjiang branch based in south China's Guangdong Province.
This remarkable discovery is expected to play a role in ensuring stable supply of oil and gas resources for China.
High-production well discovered at oil-gas field in Beibu Gulf
More than 1,000 coal mines in China have adopted intelligent systems, as their application expands from pilot projects to large-scale deployment, the China National Coal Association said recently.
Statistics show that by the end of 2025, a total of 1,066 coal mines nationwide have introduced smart systems, with such technologies now supporting more than 65 percent of the country's coal production capacity. The number of autonomous mining trucks in operation surpassed 4,000 units, roughly doubling on an annual basis.
The rapid adoption of smart mining is driven by robust domestic capabilities in intelligent equipment and technology. In Beijing, a newly deployed underground Internet of Things (IoT) precision positioning and management system links workers, positioning cards and operating zones, while also enabling health monitoring. Its core technologies and components are fully domestically developed and have been applied in coal mines and coal preparation plants. "This underground positioning system we've developed has a positioning deviation of less than 20 centimeters when a person or device is stationary. Even when a person or device is moving at high speeds, the margin of error remains minimal. A single device can cover a radius of 800 meters," said Wu Fengdong, general manager of China Coal Beijing Coal Mining Machinery Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of the state-owned China National Coal Group Corporation.
Since the start of the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021–2025), cumulative investment in smart mining has exceeded 107.1 billion yuan (about 15.6 billion U.S. dollars), with intelligent technologies now widely applied, accelerating the shift from traditional mining to modern, technology-driven extraction.
Over 60 pct of China's coal production capacity uses smart technology by end of 2025
