Natural gas

Engineering

Shale gas

Microeconomics

Oil shale

Petroleum engineering

China

Archaeology

Economics

Computer science

Geology

Waste management

Geography

Tight gas

Environmental science

Hydraulic fracturing

Production (economics)

Applied Soft Computing

Tight gas, shale gas and coalbed gas are recognized as the three sources of unconventional natural gas in the world. Currently, China’s tight gas production is at an absolute advantage. Hence, a reasonable prediction of tight gas production is of great value to China’s government in formulating energy policies. In this study, the data characteristics of China’s tight gas production were analysed. Then a new-structure grey Verhulst model for predicting China’s tight gas production was employed, and the time response function and initial value optimization method of the new model were deduced. Next, the new model was used to simulate and predict China’s tight gas production. The comprehensive error was 2.07%, which was much smaller than that of the traditional grey Verhulst model (7.78%) and the GM(1,1) model (18.57%). Finally, China’s tight gas production was predicted and analysed. The results show that the growth of China’s tight gas production will slow down in the next three years due to the high cost of tight gas exploitation. Therefore, Chinese government should speed up tight gas exploitation through policy support; meanwhile, China needs to continue importing large quantities of natural gas to ensure sufficient domestic supply of natural gas.

A new-structure grey Verhulst model for China’s tight gas production forecasting