Can Fracking Clean China’s Air and Slow Climate Change?

China is drilling ahead for shale gas, but the country faces economic, environmental and geologic challenges in tapping the resource

Jan 27, 2014 | David Biello, associate editor for Scientific American

A fuel to slow climate change lies 3,000 meters below a new wellhead in China’s Sichuan Province. There, shale gas production has begun, and it just might help wean China off the coal that has made it the world’s worst carbon dioxide polluter—and blanketed the nation in bad air.

Getting that world-changing gas requires pumping millions of liters of specially treated water down a deep well to fracture subterranean shale. It also requires the know-how to thread a well through a layer perhaps just a few tens of meters thick at the bottom. And it requires the infrastructural support—and legal framework—to get that gas to market and reward those who produce it.

“The vision is that Chinese shale gas has geostrategic benefits, it has environmental benefits and it has economic benefits,” says David Sandalow, the inaugural fellow at Columbia University’s new Center on Global Energy Policy who until last year was assistant secretary for policy and international affairs at the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE). “The U.S. government has seen shale gas in China as in our common strategic interest.” As a result, the U.S. has partnered with the communist country to help develop the new resource, including the U.S.–China Shale Gas Initiative unveiled during Pres. Barack Obama’s trip to Beijing in 2009.

From Anhui to Xinjiang Chinese companies have begun to drill into the earth for shale gas. One well in Sichuan has already produced more than two million cubic meters of shale gas that, when burned as fuel, produces roughly half the CO2 emissions of burning coal—as well as less soot, smog and other human health threats from air pollution.

Big play

My 2 cents, prejudiced by earlier reports:

This is an interesting tale of hope, but China is also fraught with Dodge and Chevy pickup trucks and SUVs and Mercedes dump trucks, with more planned in the coming years.  Hong Kong is a bit of a showplace for Chinese tech and futurama, loaded with young, eager entrepreneurs, many of whom tout the advantages of owning and operating electric vehicles for all needs.  It’s a nice light-show, but it is also a small island community, and the mass of China still revolves around mines, the farm, ranches, and, soon, industrial fracking.

It’s a good first effort by a first world nation, that keeps its population in the second world.  As it is, it seems that once you hit Asia, you find that coal in every country there remains the main source for electricity and winter-warmth.

I hope it all works out, but this initiative needs to overshadow China’s need for internal combustion, as well as, and I’m sorry to have to say it, its space program, both of which have proven to be expensive drains on local money and ecology, as the importance of fracking’s success has a very global reach.