“We are aiming for major breakthroughs in locating the reserves in five years, and in eight years shale gas should take a significant position in China’s energy mix,” said Zhang at the land ministry. ![]() The auction is for eight exploration blocks covering 18,000 square kilometres in four inland provinces: southwest Sichuan, Chongqing and Guizhou, and central Hubei province. The ministry had previously delayed the auction, initially scheduled last November, to open up the bidding to more domestic companies - inject more competition into the process and quicken the pace of shale development. The MLR said it would hold the first auction of shale gas blocks by the end of the first quarter of this year, so it is already overdue. The starting gun for that race is about to fire any day now. Regardless, China is racing to find out how much shale gas it can exploit - and how quickly it can get the technology and build the infrastructure it needs to pump it to market - to reduce its dependence on foreign sources of gas. This study argues that significant amounts of methane - a potent greenhouse gas - escape into the atmosphere during production in wells and distribution in pipelines. It faces the prospect of becoming as dependent on international markets for gas as it is for oil, where China is the world’s second-largest importer.īut shale gas may not be as clean as advertised, according to a study released last week by Cornell University in New York. The problem is China cannot meet its rising demand for gas with its limited reserves of conventional gas. Natural gas burns more cleanly than other fossil fuels and installing gas-fired power generation is cheaper and easier than building nuclear plants. China also pumps more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than any other country.īeijing’s bureaucrats thus face a daunting challenge: how to clean up its brown skies while meeting the world’s fastest growing energy demand. ![]() ![]() It will soon overtake the United States as the world’s top energy user and is already the world’s biggest coal burner. Industry estimates in China peg shale gas resources slightly lower - but still huge - at 26 trillion cubic metres (tcm), although they have yet to give their own forecasts of how much of that is recoverable.Ĭhina’s imminent shale rush comes at a critical point. Energy Information Agency in a report last month estimates China holds 36.1 trillion cubic metres (1,275 trillion cubic feet) of technically recoverable shale gas reserves - significantly higher than the 24.4 tcm (862 trillion cubic feet) in the United States, which has the second-most. That gives us a lot of confidence,” said Zhang Dawei, deputy director of the Strategic Research Centre for Oil and Gas in the Ministry of Land and Resources (MLR).Ĭhina’s confidence has been bolstered by a new report of its estimated reserves of shale gas, which shows them to be, by far, the largest in the world. “America’s shale gas production alone has exceeded that of total Chinese gas output. This is an American dream that China wants to emulate. Instead, the United States is turning import facilities into export terminals, because its shale gas reserves are estimated to be big enough to meet domestic demand for 30 years. Just a few years ago, the United States was building scores of expensive facilities to import liquefied natural gas (LNG), looking at booming long-term demand forecasts and wondering which countries would supply the huge volume of imports it needed. ![]() Once deemed too costly to extract, shale gas has turned around U.S. Just over a year ago, Beijing awakened to a technology revolution that has unlocked massive reserves of gas trapped within shale rock formations in the United States. REUTERS/Stringerīut China may have more energy riches under its own soil than policy makers in the world’s second-largest economy ever dared imagine. Workers carry out a practice drill in case of a hydrogen sulfide leak at a natural gas appraisal well of Sinopec in Langzhong county, Sichuan province March 1, 2011.
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