China To Increase Shale Gas Production

China plans to increase its shale gas production from 1.3 billion cubic meters of shale gas per year to 30 billion cubic meters per year by 2020, according to Chen Weidong of China National Offshore Oil Corp. This goal is significantly less than the 60 to 80 billion cubic meter goal set in 2012, when the Chinese government declared it would start extracting its reserves, which are the largest in the world. The goal was reduced because of difficult drilling conditions.

Though China became the second largest shale gas producer in 2014, it will likely have to increase its reliance on imports over the next few years because demand is growing faster than production. "Last year, the import dependency was about 31 percent. By 2020 that dependency will go up to 40 to 50 percent," said James Henderson, senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy. "We'll get the supply from Russia and also [from] Turkmenistan. We've already got secured supplies for over 400