Could Sichuan province be China's North Dakota?
China struggles to tap its shale gas
By Steven Mufson, WashPost, Published: April 30
BEIJING — In a remote corner of Sichuan with lush, terraced hillsides, oil exploration teams have been scaling cliffs to lay seismic charges and struggling to move heavy equipment along winding mountain roads.
That is where China hopes to find vast stores of natural gas trapped in shale rock. The U.S. Energy Information Administration has estimated that China’s technically recoverable shale gas resources could be 50 percent bigger than those in the United States, where shale has transformed the energy sector.
That has sparked hopes that unlocking those resources could help meet China’s relentlessly growing energy demand and ease its reliance on heavily polluting coal-fired power plants.
But progress on China’s shale frontier has been slow. About 60 shale exploration wells have been drilled over the past two years, according to the consulting firm IHS CERA, about as many as are drilled in North Dakota every 10 days. And there has been no Chinese shale production.
China’s shale gas deposits may be large, but they are remote, and in most places, there is not enough water to provide for the hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, technique used to create cracks that unlock gas trapped in the rock.
(More here.)
BEIJING — In a remote corner of Sichuan with lush, terraced hillsides, oil exploration teams have been scaling cliffs to lay seismic charges and struggling to move heavy equipment along winding mountain roads.
That is where China hopes to find vast stores of natural gas trapped in shale rock. The U.S. Energy Information Administration has estimated that China’s technically recoverable shale gas resources could be 50 percent bigger than those in the United States, where shale has transformed the energy sector.
That has sparked hopes that unlocking those resources could help meet China’s relentlessly growing energy demand and ease its reliance on heavily polluting coal-fired power plants.
But progress on China’s shale frontier has been slow. About 60 shale exploration wells have been drilled over the past two years, according to the consulting firm IHS CERA, about as many as are drilled in North Dakota every 10 days. And there has been no Chinese shale production.
China’s shale gas deposits may be large, but they are remote, and in most places, there is not enough water to provide for the hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, technique used to create cracks that unlock gas trapped in the rock.
(More here.)
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