Daqing Oil Field
The Daqing Oil Field, situated in Heilongjiang Province in northeastern China, is the nation's largest oil-producing region, discovered in 1959 through exploratory drilling that confirmed vast hydrocarbon reserves in the Songliao Basin.[1][2] It rapidly developed into a cornerstone of China's petroleum industry, achieving giant field status by 1976 with cumulative proven reserves exceeding 5.67 billion metric tons of oil equivalent by 2007.[1][2] From the 1960s onward, Daqing supplied a dominant share of China's domestic crude oil output, accounting for over 50 percent annually between 1964 and 1980 and peaking at around 80 percent by 1975, which fueled industrial expansion amid geopolitical isolation following the Sino-Soviet split.[3][4] Production reached its zenith in 1997 before entering a decline phase typical of mature fields, yet sustained output through tertiary recovery methods has exceeded 10 million tons annually for two decades, alongside growing natural gas extraction surpassing 6 billion cubic meters in 2024.[5][6][7] The field's exploitation has driven economic prosperity in the Daqing region, transforming it into one of China's wealthier locales via resource revenues, but it has also inflicted notable environmental costs, including pollution and ecological disruption to surrounding wetlands and lakes from wastewater discharge and industrial activities.[8][9] These impacts underscore the trade-offs in resource extraction, where empirical data on declining reserves and rising recovery costs signal challenges for long-term viability without technological offsets.[5][10]Geography and Geology
Location and Geological Features
The Daqing Oil Field is located in Heilongjiang Province, northeastern China, within the Songliao Basin, a large Cretaceous sedimentary basin spanning approximately 260,000 square kilometers across Heilongjiang and Jilin provinces. The field occupies the central depression of the basin, centered around Daqing City, positioned between Qiqihar to the northwest and Harbin to the southeast, in a region characterized by flat plains and alluvial deposits.[11] Geologically, the Songliao Basin formed as a continental rift basin during the Late Jurassic to Early Cretaceous, undergoing initial rifting followed by post-rift thermal subsidence that facilitated rapid depositional filling with thicknesses exceeding 3,000 meters in the central areas. This subsidence, driven by lithospheric extension and mantle upwelling, created accommodation space for predominantly fluvial-lacustrine sediments, including mudstones, shales, and sandstones, under a humid paleoclimate. Tectonic inversion in the Late Cretaceous further influenced structural development, but the primary framework for hydrocarbon preservation stems from the basin's Mesozoic extensional history.[12][13][14] The Daqing reservoirs are primarily hosted in the Lower Cretaceous Qingshankou Formation, comprising dark shales and fine- to medium-grained feldspathic sandstones, overlain by the Yaojia Formation sandstones, both deposited in deltaic and lacustrine environments. These layers exhibit porosity ranging from 15-25% and permeability up to several millidarcies, enabling fluid migration and accumulation. Hydrocarbon traps formed through anticlinal folding, faulting, and nose-like structures in the central uplift, resulting from differential subsidence and later compressional stresses, which sealed the reservoirs against overlying impermeable shales.[15][11][16]