China: 500 million cubic meters in 5 years

It’s an ambitious plan for a country whose hunger for energy just continues to grow.

A senior leader of China’s biggest energy enterprise says his company plans on producing a substantial quantity of shale gas in the next five years.

Of course Deputy General Manager of the state-controlled China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC), Liao Yongyuan admits that the potential of shale gas in China cannot yet be determined without a study, but he says the plan is to produce 500 million cubic meters of shale gas by 2015.

That is only a fraction of the natural gas that China will need. By that time, according to a report on Risk.net, every year CNPC should be importing 80 billion cubic meters of gas – over 10 times what it imported last year. This year, 1.5 billion cubic meters of gas were delivered to China from Central Asia, the piece notes.

It sounds like the Chinese won’t let much get in their way to secure their domestic supply of energy, in particular regarding their plans for shale gas.



“The Chinese are willing to do whatever it takes to secure their energy supplies,” says independent energy expert Cornelia Meyer. “In China’s case, if somewhere has the energy it needs, it will secure the minerals in that field.”



Another analyst tells Risk.net that if the development of shale gas plays in China results in lower natural gas prices, then gas-powered generation is likely to increase and more cars might eventually be fuelled with natural gas.

Get more detail, read "China homes in on shale gas".