Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
and the demand gap will be 180 billion cubic metres, since the conventional
gas production will be only 200 billion cubic metres at that time (Dawei
Zhang, Ministry of Land and Resources of China, personal communication,
June 14, 2013). Fortunately, China is sitting on the largest shale gas reserves
in the whole world. The exploration and development of these reserves have
potentially wide ranges of benefits for China's economy, energy security and
mitigation of CO
2
emission. China is looking to imitate a decade-long
growth of the commercial shale industry in the United States, which grew
from 2 to 23% of total gas production from 2001 to 2010.
5
So far, exploration
of shale gas is still at an early stage in China and there have been many
doubts expressed over the government's seemingly unrealistic 12
th
Five-year
Plan target of 6.5 billion cubic metres (230 billion cubic feet) per year of
shale gas production by 2015, due to the slow progress over the past several
years.
4
One recent breakthrough which may change the skeptics' attitude
and make China's 2015 output target possible is based on the commercially
viable production of shale gas in Sichuan Basin, especially in the Fuling area
recently in late 2013, which makes China the only country outside of North
America that has reported commercial production.
At the same time as reporting shale gas exploration progress, Beijing
adopted new policies and announced financial incentives for the develop-
ment of the shale gas industry, as well as measures to encourage com-
petition and liberalization of the natural gas market. Generally, both
encouraging prospects and challenges exist for China's shale gas develop-
ment. The purpose of this chapter is to review the shale gas resources in
China and to examine the pros and cons for shale gas development in China.
2 Geology and Shale Gas Resources in China
The organic rich shales spanning from the Pre-Cambrian Sinian period
(prior to the Cambrian period and 700 million years before the present day)
to the Quaternary period (the last two million years up to the present day) are
widely distributed in China. The Pre-Cambrian to Upper Paleozoic organic-
rich shales with gas window maturity; Mesozoic to Cenozoic organic-rich
shales with wet gas window maturity; and shallow Quaternary shales with
biogenic gas all have shale gas potential. The Pre-Cambrian to Lower
Paleozoic shales are distributed all over China and were deposited in passive
margin to foreland marine settings; the Upper Paleozoic (Carboniferous to
Permian) shales, mainly in South China, North China and NW China, were
deposited in transitional (coastal swamp associated with coal) cratonic
settings; the Meso-Cenozoic sporadically distributed shales were deposited
in rift, lacustrine (lake) settings (see Figure 1). Table 1 illustrates the wide
distribution of major potential gas shales in time and space for all the China
shales in three depositional settings. Comparing China gas shale resource
basins with US gas shale resource basins, the primary difference is that the
potential shale gas basins in China are widely distributed in various tectonic
and sedimentary settings throughout the Chinese territory, whereas US shale
