A Comparison between Shale Gas in China and Unconventional Fuel Development in the United States: Health, Water and Environmental Risks

Abstract

China is appraised to have the world's largest exploitable reserves of shale gas, although several legal, regulatory, environmental and investment-related issues will likely restrain its scope. China's capacity to successfully face these hurdles and produce commercial shale gas will have a crucial impact on the regional gas market and on China's energy mix, as Beijing strives to decrease reliance on imported oil and coal, while attempting to meet growing energy demand and maintain a certain level of resource autonomy. The development of the unconventional natural gas extractive industry will also endow China with further negotiating power to obtain more advantageous prices from Russia and future liquefied natural gas (LNG) suppliers. This paper, adopting a comparative perspective, underlines the trends learned from unconventional fuel development in the United States, emphasizing their potential application to the Chinese context in light of recently signed production-sharing contracts between qualified foreign investors and China. The wide range of regulatory and enforcement problems in this matter are accrued by an extremely limited liberalization of gas prices, lack of technological development, and political hurdles curbing the opening of resource extraction to private investors. These issues are exacerbated by concerns related to the risk of water pollution deriving from mismanaged drilling and fracturing, absence of adequate regulation framework and industry standards, entailing consequences on social stability and environmental degradation.

A mobile application to protect groundwater during unconventional oil and gas extraction

“…With information disclosure exemptions, understanding environmental impacts and the linked health outcomes become increasingly difficult for citizens, as does finding common ground with others [ 22 , 68 , 79 , 81 ]. Legislation that currently governs UOG extraction in the US, does not address these different knowledge gaps [ 67 , 68 , 80 ]. For example, in Pennsylvania, UOG extraction companies are only required to notify properties that are in close range and adjacent to the wells about development plans, meaning that the rest of the public will only find out once permits have been allocated [ 25 , 68 ].…”

Cognitive Biases in Understanding the Influence of Shale Gas Exploitation: From Environmental and Economic Perspectives

“…Primary researches concentrates on China's geological conditions and exploitation technologies (Hua et al, 2009;Wang et al, 2009;Chen et al, 2011;Wei et al, 2012). Some discussed the promotional policy of the China shale gas exploitation (Zhao et al, 2011;Farah and Tremolada, 2013;Zhang and Jiang, 2013), mainly focusing on analyzing the strategy based on the successful experience of the U.S. Many references stated the key elements resulting in the difference of estimated environmental impact between the two countries.…”

Evaluating China’s Environmental Management and Risks Avoidance Policies and Regulations on Offshore Methane Hydrate Extraction

“…In sum, offshore methane hydrate extraction, similarly to shale gas [12], imposes a real threat to the environment under a variety of different perspectives. Therefore, it is worthwhile to examine any legislative safeguards that could protect the marine and coastal environment from the damage caused by offshore methane extraction.…”