Introduction

Abstract

The idea of shale gas production has appeared nearly two centuries ago. But only in the recent decades, the technologies of the shale gas extraction were developed which permit the commercial scale of shale gas production; thus, it became possible to speak about the “shale revolution.” The pioneer in this field was the USA which achieved considerable success here. At the same time, other countries that launched the shale gas production project have not been as successful as the USA so far. Regardless of this fact, the shale gas production affected significantly the arrangement of forces in the global gas market forcing many countries to take into consideration this factor in evolving their energy strategies.