The field starts with a single well. On 16 April 1961 the North China petroleum exploration office drilled Hua 8 near Dongying village in Guangrao County and it found industrial oil. Two years later a well called Ying 2, on the Dongying structure, produced 555 tonnes a day, then the highest daily output in the country, and the works was nicknamed the 923 Plant, which became the Shengli Oil Field. Large-scale extraction began on 25 January 1964, a further campaign was organised for Gudao in 1971, and in 1975 the field formed its first women's drilling crew. Because of national security and the international situation, the field's existence was kept quiet for more than a decade; it was announced publicly in 1974.
From the journal
The City Built on Oil
Shengli, the Victory Field, was found in 1961 under the wet ground of the delta. Dongying was created for it, and its districts, its two news services and its pumpjacks all grew from the same decision.
In the same city · Dongying ↗One well, then a campaign
Oil in thin seams under soft ground
The delta is a hard place to drill. Soils shift, temperatures are high, and the groundwater is salty, so the crude comes up with more than 95 per cent water in it. The oil is viscous and lies in thin seams: some are only 6 metres thick, 92 per cent of the reservoir lies deeper than 1.2 kilometres, and some reach 2.5 kilometres. The field was originally estimated to hold 5.21 billion tonnes, most of it onshore, and the most productive reservoirs sit in the Cenozoic Guantao and Shahejie formations. Output climbed steeply through the 1980s, passing 24 million tonnes in 1983 and 30 million by 1986, and peaked at 33.55 million tonnes in 1991.
A city drawn around the wells
Oil built the map. Dongying was created on 1 October 1983 as a base for developing the field and the delta; Gudao Town was established in November 1992 around the extraction works, and Xianhe Town grew around the industry in the same way. Most company work now happens in Dongying, though the field also operates in seven other Shandong cities and twenty-eight other counties. The city runs two sets of newspapers and television, one municipal and one belonging to the field, aimed at workers and their families. The wetland cost is on the record too: when the reserve's borders were set, 515 wells producing 4.5 per cent of output lay inside them, and from 2018 some wells were closed to protect delta wetlands.