A Chinese oil company has launched the drilling of Asia's deepest oil well on Monday in the Tarim Basin, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

The Yuejin 3-3 well, designed to be as deep as 9,472 meters, will be a significant breakthrough in ultra-deep oil and gas exploration, which will help the country boost its crude oil production.

Tarim Basin is the country's largest petroliferous basin, accounting for more than 60 percent of the nation's onshore ultra-deep oil and gas resources.

However, it is also one of the most difficult areas to explore in China, partly because its oil and gas reserves lie between 6,000 and 10,000 meters underground. By contrast, one of the world's deepest oil well, Russia's Z-44 goes over 12,000 meters into the ground.

To overcome the extreme conditions of high temperature and high pressure at a depth over 9,000 meters, Chinese energy conglomerate Sinopec has improved drilling technologies, which puts the country among the few nations in the world capable of drilling 10,000-meter-deep wells.

"Through brainstorming and innovation, we've developed state-of-the-art technologies in designing drilling systems, as well as operating and supporting them in deep, complex environment, marking breakthroughs in key technologies," said Wang Long, secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) northwestern oil field committee of Sinopec Research Institute of Petroleum Engineering. "Drilling time has dropped from 280 days three years ago, to as low as 97 days now."

"Meanwhile, drilling accuracy has increased from 60 percent to over 90 percent," Wang said.

The Yuejin 3-3 well is part of the Shendi-1 oil project. There are 120 wells deeper than 8,000 meters in the Taklamakan Desert inside the basin.

Sinopac planned to finish the drilling in 170 days.