the cost for a well there is four times that of a Marcellus well.
.............
I can’t say that I get the logic of this article.
To begin with natural gas prices in asia are freaking 4 times that of the USA. so the usa gas prices are $4per unit gas measurement. But in China the cost is $16 per same unit gas measurement.
So what the hey if it costs more to extract natural gas. They can get much more for it.
The Marcellus gas volumes are just enormous. But Sichuan volumes according to the article are 2.5 times larger. As the article states.
“On average, production from wells drilled in the Sichuan Province, China’s most lucrative shale formation, are about 2.5 times that of a well found in America’s best shale gas play, the Marcellus.”
Well alright if the volumes are higher than the cost per unit volume is going to be lower.
Something isn’t right about the article.
My guess is that the companies doing the fracking don’t know how to do it well. Plus they are faced with all kinds of infrastructure problems.
The USA has absolutely the best infrastucture in the world for fracking yet right now there are huge bottlenecks to moving the natural gas around in the USA. Those problems would be dwarfed by the problems China faces with moving natural gas around.
China just signed a natural gas deal with russia that requries china to build 25 billion natural gas pipline from the Russian border to where ever in china. This is a really simple pipeline. Its not like they have to install thousands of feeder lines from every fracked well. All the natural gas comes from one source.
There’s something odd and awkward about the article that doesn’t make sense. The author is motivated by something he doesn’t say and he brushes over stuff he doesn’t understand.
The Platt’s article provides a better, but bare bones, description of the challenges.