The Globe and Mail: China Looks to Spur Shale Gas Industry as Companies Halt Exploration

With hopes of a U.S.-style shale gas boom sputtering, Chinese officials are faulting their own government’s management and proposing new experimental zones as a way to spur a new drilling rush.

China drilled its first shale gas well in 2010, its ambitions stoked by reports that its rocks held the largest such resource on Earth.

But the promised wealth of shale gas has not materialized, and the past two years have seen national targets cut several times – even the 2015 goal may now be out of reach, officials say – as both foreign and domestic companies halted exploration work and land goes left undrilled.

The most prospective shale gas regions of China’s southern Sichuan Basin occupy roughly 25,000 square kilometres.

“However, right now we are only working on several hundred square kilometres,” said Zhang Dawei, a director and researcher at the Mineral Reserve Review Centre in China’s Ministry of Land and Resources. MORE