[China on the move] From Heilongjiang: Daqing Oil Field

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Our reporter Liu Ying takes us to Daqing, an oil city in northeast China's Heilongjiang province. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the Daqing oil field, China's biggest oil field. Over the past half century, Daqing has been in an important part in safeguarding China's oil security. But dwindling reserve is a major challenge. Liu Ying tells us how scientists and engineers strive to build Daqing into an oil field that can last 100 years.

I'm now at China's biggest oil production base, Daqing. The discovery of this oil field 50 years ago put an end to China's history as a non-oil producing nation. Since that time, Daqing has yielded more than 2 billion tons of oil, more than 40 percent of the country's total. It's a tremendous contribution to China's economic development.

As one of the world's most productive oil fields, Daqing maintained an annual crude output of more than 50 million tons for 27 consecutive years.

But after decades of stable and high yield exploration, a question has been raised. How long can the Daqing oil field sustain this production?

It's estimated there is 440 million tons of useable oil left. But exploration of the reserves is considered to be increasingly more difficult.

Wang Qimin, a key technological veteran of the oil field, acknowledges the challenge.

Wang said, "The biggest challenge we are facing is that our oil field is getting older. It contains a much higher level of water. That makes the output much lower."

Technological upgrades and innovation are considered the keys to tackling the problem.

Daqing Exploration and Development Research Institute is home to more than 1800 scientists and engineers in the field of oil exploration, and is dubbed as the underground brains of the oil field. Breaking technological bottlenecks and enhancing the rate of oil recovery are increasingly critical tasks here.