China is increasing production of shale gas. So, for seven months of the current year its production is made up of 5.01 billion cubic metres, which is significantly more than in the same period last year, when it was produced, according to September data from the National Bureau of statistics, only 600 million cubic meters.
The main volumes of shale gas while China obtains in the field Fuling Sichuan basin, which the company develops Sinopec — for the first seven months of 2016, there was produced 3,054 billion cubic meters of “blue fuel”, according to data from Sinopec.
The second phase of this development to be completed in 2017, each year the company plans to produce up to 10 billion cubic meters.
Last year, the annual gas consumption in China grew by 3.7%, to 191 billion cubic meters. In January of this year the monthly consumption of gas increased by 17.6% compared to the same period in 2015 to 22.3 billion cubic meters.
The CERS forecast that the annual volume of natural gas consumption in China by 2020 will grow to 290 billion cubic meters, and by 2030 — up to 480 billion cubic meters, forcing the Chinese government by 2020 to increase shale gas production to 30 billion cubic meters.
Presumably, the reserves Fuling amount to 2.1 trillion cubic meters.
It should be noted that China has several years of experience in the field of shale gas, but with varying degrees of success is attributed mainly to the complicated geological structure of layers that must be developed by the Chinese producers.
But if the situation will favour Chinese producers, due to shale gas China will become the second country in the world on volume of extraction of shale gas. So, by 2040, China could increase its gas production up to 0.5 billion cubic meters per day, although a number of analysts believe that shale gas in China is more hype and a bubble that will burst sooner or later, which, incidentally, is the experience of some other countries that have abandoned shale gas, though, and hoped for more positive results. Therefore, some analysts suggest that China will not build global plans for the extraction of this raw material, and concentrate power more on how to ensure imports gas from other countries to meet its domestic needs.
