China’s offshore oil and gas driller CNOOC Ltd. announced Monday that a high-quality and high-yield oil flow has been found in the Bohai Sea area.

The offshore natural gas discovery, Bozhong 19-6, has verified proven geological reserve exceeding 100 billion cubic metres, Reuters reported.

 It is the largest oil and gas discovery in the Bohai Bay Basin in the past 50 years, and could be used by millions of city dwellers for hundreds of years, RT.com reported, citing the China Daily.

 The state-controlled company said the reserve figure was certified by China’s Ministry of Land and Resources.

CNOOC first announced the discovery, which also contains condensate, a super light crude oil, in the Bohai Sea off north China, in late 2017.

Although the Bohai Oilfield is the second-largest crude oil production base in China, its discovered reserves in the past 50 years were mainly crude oil. Until now, few natural gas discoveries have been made due to the complex’s geological structure.

After extraction, the natural gas could be directly transported to the market through existing pipelines.

Meanwhile, markets have cheered U.S. President Donald Trump’s assertion that a deal with China is “very, very close,” but data on China’s imports of U.S. oil, liquefied natural gas and coal show that once a trade flow is interrupted, getting it back is hard, Reuters explained.

China’s imports of U.S. crude oil were zero for a second month in a row in January, according to Chinese customs data released on Monday.

For full-year 2018, in contrast, China imported 245,616 barrels per day (bpd) from the United States, up 25 percent from the year before.

This made crude oil one of the successes in efforts to lower China’s trade surplus with the United States. The advent of Trump’s trade tariffs, however, resulted in the flow being choked, even though crude wasn’t subject to retaliatory measures from Beijing.

There are also few signs of the trade resuming despite the conciliatory language by Trump and extended negotiations between senior officials of the world’s two largest economies.

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