The World: The Next Fracking Frontier: China?

On Shanghai’s Huangpu River, a barge hauls coal upstream to one of the power plants that keeps this city booming. China is the world’s biggest energy guzzler, and it gets three-quarters of its power from coal.

But coal is one of the dirtiest fuels around. It’s the main reason so many of China’s cities are choked with smog, and why China is now the world’s biggest greenhouse gas polluter.

China energy analyst Bill Dodson says it’s “one of the disappointments in China’s rapid development… that it chose to use technologies that are about 200-years-old.”

But these days China is scrambling to find newer and cleaner technologies. And it thinks it’s found a promising one in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

Fracking is a relatively new way of getting at cleaner-burning natural gas. It uses pressurized water and chemicals to fracture soft shale rock deep underground and pump out natural gas trapped inside. The technology is revolutionizing energy markets and helping gas take a big bite out of coal use in the US. MORE