Progress and prospects of natural gas development technologies in China

Abstract

Under the present situation of low global oil prices and vigorous development of green energy resources, China has turned to focus on natural gas in oil and gas sector, both production and consumption of which are soaring high these days and the role of which is gradually prominent in energy sources. With the aims to help promote the further rapid development of natural gas business in China, this paper analyzed natural gas development process and summarized the new advances in natural gas development technologies in the recent years. On this basis, this paper analyzed the prospects of natural gas development in China in the four aspects of production rates, demand potential, import volume, future position of natural gas. The following results were obtained. (1) Since the 12th Five-Year Plan, natural gas business has been doing well with a rapid increase of consumption, diversified supply sources, steadily increasing of reserves and production rates, obviously satisfactory benefits from exploitation. (2) Breakthroughs have been made in technical bottlenecking problems with an improved innovation capacity in the respects of deep-strata gas development, large-scale gas field development adjustment, tight-gas recovery enhancement, development of shale and CBM gas, engineering techniques, and development strategies support system. (3) With the deepening of development, influenced by policies, environment concerns and geological conditions, continuous efficient natural gas development will face up with such challenges as lower ratio of quality reserves, higher gas field development expenses, more difficult benefit development of unconventional gas reservoirs, further compressed upstream benefits, less stable production capacity of those major gas fields, increasingly fierce competition in the energy market, etc. In conclusion, it is demonstrated that natural gas development in China will enter into a new stage of attaching equal importance to both unconventional and conventional gas; natural gas demand potential will be great and its consumption structure will become more diversified; gas imports will rise year by year, resulting in the vigorously increasing external dependency; and natural gas will become the main growth engine in the process of energy mix adjustment.