China's unconventional oil: A review of its resources and outlook for long-term production Jianliang Wang a, * , Lianyong Feng a , Mohr Steve b , Xu Tang a , Tverberg E. Gail c , H € o € ok Mikael d a School of Business Administration, China University of Petroleum, Beijing, China b Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, Australia c Our Finite World,1246 Shiloh Trail East NW, Kennesaw, GA 30144, USA d Global Energy Systems, Department of Earth Science, Uppsala University, Sweden article info Article history: Received 9 July 2014 Received in revised form 11 December 2014 Accepted 16 December 2014 Available online xxx Keywords: Unconventional oil Production modeling Resources Chinese oil abstract Due to the expected importance of unconventional oil in China's domestic oil supply, this paper first investigates the four types of China's unconventional oil resources comprehensively: heavy and extra- heavy oil, oil sands, broad tight oil and kerogen oil. Our results show that OIP (Oil-in-Place) of these four types of resources amount to 19.64 Gt, 5.97 Gt, 25.74 Gt and 47.64 Gt respectively, while TRRs (technically recoverable resources) amount to 2.24 Gt, 2.26 Gt, 6.95 Gt and 11.98 Gt respectively. Next, the Geologic Resources Supply-Demand Model is used to quantitatively project the long-term production of unconventional oil under two resource scenarios (TRR scenario and Proved Reserve þ Cumulative Pro- duction scenario). Our results indicate that total unconventional oil production will peak in 2068 at 0.351 Gt in TRR scenario, whereas peak year and peak production of PR (proved reserves) þ CP (Cu- mulative Production) scenario are 2023 and 0.048 Gt, significantly earlier and lower than those of TRR scenario. The implications of this growth in production of unconventional oil for China are also analyzed. The results show that if the TRR scenario can be achieved, it will increase total supply and improve oil security considerably. However, achieving the production in TRR scenario has many challenges, and even if it is achieved, China will still need to rely on imported oil. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction China's oil demand is forecast to keep increasing in the next several decades due to its continuous economic growth. In 2012, a total of 483.70 million metric tonnes (Mt) of oil was consumed in China [1], and this figure is estimated to reach 650 ± 50 Mt in 2030 and 750 ± 50 Mt in 2050, by CAE (Chinese Academy of Engineering) [2]. In the forecast of IEA (International Energy Agency), even in the fairly low-growth New Policies Scenario, the figure will rise to approximately 750 Mt by 2030 [3], 20 years earlier than estimated by CAE for the same consumption. Most scholars expect that China's conventional oil production will peak before 2020, with peak production of approximately 200 Mt; thereafter, production will decline steadily [4,5]. As a result of limited conventional oil supply and soaring oil demand, China's oil security will face unprecedented challenges. Because of these issues, development of unconventional oil has been recognized as an important and realistic option for China to offset the effects of decline in its conventional oil production and to improve its oil security, especially after the U.S. shale-energy revolution [6]. Recently, a number of studies have focused on Chinese uncon- ventional hydrocarbons. Nearly all of these papers limit their ana- lyses to general concepts, types of formations, characteristics, resource potential, and technology of unconventional oil [7e10]. Furthermore, conclusions regarding resource potential vary considerably. For example, the OIP (Oil-In-Place) of Chinese oil sands is estimated by Mohr and Evans [11] to be only 273 Mt, while the corresponding estimate by Zou et al. [7] is 6000 Mt. At present, many scholars have missed that these differences in resource es- timates exist, since no comparative analysis or explanatory dis- cussion of current literature are available. In addition, there has been no quantitative research focusing on future production of * Corresponding author. E-mail address: wangjianliang305@163.com (J.L. Wang). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Energy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/energy http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2014.12.042 0360-5442/© 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Energy xxx (2015) 1e12 Please cite this article in press as: Wang JL, et al., China's unconventional oil: A review of its resources and outlook for long-term production, Energy (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2014.12.042