But as China's economy continues to grow, so does the country's energy consumption, and with it the scale of the challenge that the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) faces.

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The State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) regularly tries to halt to polluting projects around the country, but it has relatively little clout within China's bureaucracy and its edicts are widely ignored.

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Officials think the first wells will be drilled in late 2014 or early 2015, after lengthy reviews from both the state Department of Environmental Protection and the Federal Aviation Administration.

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Huge corporations can cope with the myriad rules issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and their state-level counterparts.

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But much of this is expected to be given to other agencies (the State Forestry Administration, for example, deals with stemming the spread of deserts) or to the local environmental-protection bureaus, which, being answerable to local governments, are crippled by conflicts of interest.

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