A petroleum deposit spreading 100 kilometres has been discovered in the north of Tibet by Chinese scientists.

The Qiangtang Basin in Southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region is expected to hold hundreds of millions tons of oil, it was revealed at a seminar on the western development strategy for Tibet.

Last July, a field research team led by Professor Wang Chengshan from the Chengdu University of Science and Technology collected oil-shale and other related layer samples in the Qiangtang Basin, with an area of 160,000 square kilometres and found an ancient petroleum band of up to 100 kilometres.

After further lab research, the geologic age of the shale of the Qiangtang Basin was confirmed at around 180 million years ago.

The confirmation of the geologic period is very important, said an expert with the team.

The dating of the material helped scientists determine the likelihood of oil deposits.

The capacity of crude oil and gas in the Qiangtang Basin is predicted to be somewhere between 4-and-5.4 billion tons.

The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau has several typical marine basins of the type from which the world's oil sources are mainly derived, Xinhua reported.

Experts meanwhile have made appeals to the government to pay close attention to extensive exploration in Tibet to promote its strategic development.

(China Daily 08/20/2001)