Al Jazeera English published the following article on its website on 13 December 2012. It investigates the formidable array of environmental, technical and geologic challenges confronting widespread development of shale gas in China. The article after the jump.
The story after the jump was written by me and James Byrne for Interfax Natural Gas Daily, a digital publication that reports on the global gas industry. The story was published on 21 August 2012 (subscribers only) and looks at the setbacks to China’s latest auction of rights to prospect for shale gas, which is a form of natural gas found in shale rock deep underground.
China is believed to have the largest recoverable reserves of shale gas worldwide, enough to last nearly 200 years at the country’s rate of gas consumption in 2011, but the method of extracting shale gas – hydraulic fracturing or ‘fracking’ – is environmentally contentious.
Late on in The Matrix film, there is a scene when Hugo Weaving’s Agent Smith theorises to the captured Morpheus that humans are a disease, a “cancer of this planet”. This is a tad much for Jonathan Watts, Asia environmental correspondent for the Guardian newspaper. He downgrades us to locusts instead. (more…)