China's first national-level continental shale oil demonstration zone, located in Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, has achieved its annual crude oil production target of 1.7 million metric tons ahead of schedule, its operator, China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) said.

This major accomplishment signals a systemic breakthrough in exploiting one of the world's most challenging unconventional resources, it said.

Shale oil is widely recognized as an extremely difficult-to-extract unconventional resource, the successful extraction of which presents world-class technical challenges.

The fruitful utilization of the demonstration zone marks a breakthrough for China in resolving the three major challenges of continental shale oil extraction: difficulty in sweet spot identification, difficulty in reservoir modification, and difficulty in profitable development.

These innovations have significantly improved operational efficiency, boosting the full life-cycle output of a single well from 24,000 tons to 36,000 tons.

The successful technological framework developed at the site is expected to be promoted and applied to other domestic shale oil resources. Given that China holds the world's third-largest recoverable shale oil reserves across 75 global basins in 21 countries, this breakthrough is deemed to have significant strategic importance for optimizing China's energy structure and enhancing national crude oil self-sufficiency, it said.