Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA) , which signed the first shale-gas production sharing contract in China , will trim its project in Sichuan province because of geological challenges and the area’s dense population. The Anglo-Dutch company along with China National Petroleum Corp. had planned billions of dollars in investment from this year to meet the country’s energy demand, the world’s largest. Shell now plans to focus chiefly on the development of the Changbei tight gas field in the Shaanxi region. “In Sichuan progress has been slower and more difficult than we might have hoped: partly geological reasons, partly some of the challenges of operating in the very highly populated agricultural region,” Shell Chief Financial Officer Simon Henry told investors today in New York . “It’s likely it will be smaller than originally envisaged.” China may miss its 2020 target for shale-gas production as a lack of infrastructure and technology […]