In recent years,the U.S. has successfully launched an extensive exploitation of shale gas, revolutionizing a new energy industry in the world. China is abundant of shale gas with the largest reserves in the world. However, China’s shale gas reservoirs are deeply buried featuring complicated forming environment, violent tectonic movement and fragmentary plates. Especially, the northwest and north China regions, i.e. the shale-gas-rich areas, severely lack water supply, where implementing reservoir stimulation is extremely intractable and, consequently, recovering shale gas is much more difficult and complicated than recovering in the U.S.To treat the challenges, a few innovative theories and strategies for unconventional shale gas exploitation were proposed.The fractal reconstruction theory was established to accurately describe the storage and transportation of the resources in shale rock. The high energy thermal-mechanical coupled air fracturing technology was proposed to embrittle shale rock producing a rich fracture of rock body. Upon these, the technology so-called air-driving fracturing and the thermal-expansion polymer proppant were developed for the fracturing stimulation of shale gas reservoirs,providing a foundation of the exploitation theories and techniques for exploiting shale gas in the water-shortage regions of China.
