“Following USA and Canada, China has become the third country realizing commercial production of shale gas. In the first half of 2015, China has produced 1800 million cubic meters of shale gas”, as quoted from 2015 China Mining Congress.

Zhai Gangyi, a Doctor from Oil and Gas Resources Research Center of China Geological Survey, delivered a special presentation named Progress of Exploration and Development of China’s Shale Gas on China Mining 2015 . He said that China has issued 54 shale gas prospecting rights, with 170 thousand square kilometers being covered, mainly focusing on Sichuan Basin and adjacent areas. The accumulative investment has exceeding 25 billion RMB. Up to May 2015, 80 boreholes for shale gas have been accumulatively completed nationwide; construction of shale gas capacity of 4.5 billion cubic meters per year has been completed by July 2015.

Dr Zhai further introduced that since the first production of 25 million cubic meters in 2012, China’s shale gas production began to grow rapidly. In 2013, domestic shale gas output has reached 200 million cubic meters, 1300 million cubic meters in 2014, 1.8 billion cubic meters already in the first half of 2015.

Despite the huge output, China’s shale gas exploration is still faced with great challenges. Dr Zhai summed up the chanllegens  in 4 points. Firstly, despite of the enormous potentials, geologists are still not very clear with enrichment regularity of China’s shale gas, in particular, with deposits forming mechanism and enrichment regularity of various types of shale gas, which will influence further development. Secondly, exploration breakthroughs are limited to some parts of areas and special layer, and there is still a long way to go before making really big breakthroughs. Thirdly, technical equipment is mostly domestically produced and core technologies call for further breakthroughs. Fourthly, cost for development of single well remains high, making economic development a big problem.