Last month, Weir Group held its first ever Christmas party for contacts in the Chinese oil and gas industry. It was not a particularly large or lavish event: 75 of Weir’s customers and suppliers gathered to celebrate the festive season in the usual British style at the Park Tavern pub in Shanghai. But the guests were part of a potentially momentous phenomenon: the birth of China’s shale gas industry.

Weir, which is based in Scotland but runs its oil and gas business from the heartland of the shale boom in Texas, is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of the pumps used for hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” – injecting water, sand and chemicals into wells at high pressure to open up shales and other rocks that do not give up their resources easily.

As China seeks to unlock its shale oil and gas, it offers the potential to eventually become a huge market for western companies such as Weir. “It’s going to be a long time before China reaches the US level,” says Keith Cochrane, Weir’s chief. “But there’s no question they are serious.”