Hunt for Liquid Gold Tested by Isolation in China : Taklamakan Desert: Just as demand is taking off, some of the older oil fields are running out, making the Tarim Basin the ‘great hope’ of China’s oil industry.

Li Binghu’s oil-drilling team got a quick taste of Taklamakan Desert hardships when it trekked into the heart of an expanse the Chinese call “the sea of death.”

For two days that June two years ago, the men baked in the back of trucks that heaved and plunged across 180 miles of rolling dunes in China’s remote northwest.

For two days, the men vomited, nauseous from the careening and stale air. They couldn’t pull back the tightly sealed canvas covers because wind-whipped sand as fine as table salt would plug their ears, noses and mouths.

Some workers could not keep food down for several days after arriving at Tazhong, an outpost of 5,000 men and a few women that is the center of the hunt for oil in the Taklamakan, a sun-blasted wasteland the size of Poland.

But for workers like Li, the heat, isolation and sand are just part of the job in the Taklamakan, whose name means “you can go in but you can’t get out” in the local Turkic language. China needs the oil, they say.

The Taklamakan lies in the center of the Tarim Basin, where prospecting for oil began in 1951. But exploration did not begin in earnest until the late 1980s, driven by China’s phenomenal economic growth.

After supplying its own oil needs for two decades, China had to import more last year than it exported. This year, production should be 1 billion barrels--not enough to meet projected demand of 1.2 billion barrels.

Just as demand is taking off, some of China’s older oil fields are running out, making the Tarim Basin “The Great Hope of China’s Oil Industry,” in the words of a government slogan.

The 224,000-square-mile basin is three-fourths the size of Texas. The Taklamakan, at 125,000 square miles, is the world’s second-largest shifting desert after the Sahara.

Tazhong, little more than a cluster of drilling rigs and boxcar-like dormitories, lies so far west that it is as close to Tehran as to Beijing. In Chinese, its name means simply “middle of the Taklamakan.”

If Chinese estimates are right, the Tarim Basin has 75 billion barrels of oil--more than all the estimated reserves of oil-rich Venezuela. The country with the biggest proven reserves, Saudi Arabia, has 258 billion barrels.

The Tarim Basin is expected to produce about 18.1 million barrels of oil this year, up from 13.6 million barrels last year.

Tazhong so far is producing only small amounts of oil and gas, under drilling conditions that defy comparison.

In winter, temperatures can fall to 86 degrees below zero. Workers’ gloves freeze to the metal of their equipment. They use steam to keep oil pipes from freezing, and huge fans blow warm air onto workers on the rigs.

In summer, the mercury climbs to 117 degrees. The ground can be a scorching 158 degrees. It’s too hot to wear airtight goggles against the blowing sand.

Sand dunes can tower 500 feet above the desert floor. Relentless winds can shift the dunes 15 feet in a year. Any structure that’s not surrounded by vegetation to anchor the sand could be swallowed up.

Winds at 75 m.p.h. whip sand into seemingly impenetrable walls. Oil drillers wear earplugs to keep it out. In the fiercest storms, they can’t keep their eyes open and drivers can’t see past the hoods of their vehicles. They have to pull off the road and wait, sometimes for as long as a day.

In 1990, the winds cut off air shipments for about a week, stranding 100 men without fruit, vegetables and other supplies.

“We still had a half-month’s store of grain . . . [so] we knew we wouldn’t starve to death,” said Jin Zuyou, deputy personnel director at Tazhong. Still, “morale was pretty low.”

No one has died since long-term exploration outposts were set up in the 1980s. But there have been close calls. During a glider contest held to liven things up for the oil workers, two men were lost in the desert and weren’t found for three days and nights. Their glider was never seen again.

Until last year, the only way out was by small plane. Tomatoes, flown in, cost $1.30 a pound--10 times the market price in settled parts of China.

Last year, a 136-mile road was completed from the nearest town at a cost of about $200,000 a mile. It was impossible to pave the shifting sand, so the roadbed was made of stones brought from hundreds of miles away.

Reeds were transplanted from a lake 300 miles away to keep sand from engulfing the road, the only feature breaking up a landscape of dunes that stretch from horizon to horizon.

The environment is so desolate that workers stay only two months at a time, followed by 45 days at home.

Li’s wife back home in coastal Shandong province has been supportive during his three-year hitch at Tazhong. “But if I sign up for another round, she probably will have something to say about that,” he said.

In spite of the generous time off, some workers come down with “desert syndrome.” The symptoms include lack of desire to talk, yelling and screaming, low-grade fever, and vague aches and pains.

Workers are on the rigs around the clock, putting in 12-hour shifts without a day off. But they voted down a proposal for eight-hour shifts, saying they didn’t want free time with nothing to do.

In their air-conditioned dormitories, the workers live five or six to a room. Alcohol is forbidden, and smoking is allowed only in their rooms. On the wall of Li’s room is a calendar showing landscapes with lavish greenery, cool waters and splashing waterfalls.

The workers have a basketball court and pool and Ping-Pong tables for recreation. They cook with and drink filtered water from salty wells.

In exchange for putting up with such a life, the pay is high by Chinese standards--starting about $100 a month, or three to four times the average factory worker’s pay.

But it is the challenge of desert life that keeps many workers coming back.

“Coming to Tazhong . . . is like entering another world,” said Li.

One of his workers, Zhang Jinxia, also from densely populated Shandong, was moved by his first sight of the desert: “As if everything all of a sudden opened up.”

And there is the satisfaction of knowing they are doing what few others have done.

“We’re conquering the desert,” said Jin.