Accelerating the large-scale development of unconventional oil and gas resources such as shale gas is of great significance in ensuring national energy security, realizing the carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals and green energy and low-carbon transformation of the energy industry. However, because of the overall poor quality of shale gas in China, most of the shale gas fields are marginal in terms of economic development. This is especially so for deep shale gas fields, which are difficult to develop economically. Thus, developing oil and gas asset depreciation method which is suitable for the shale gas field replacement production characteristics is helpful to carry out the project economic evaluation in a scientific and rational way, and to promote the deep shale gas scale development in China. This paper compares the common depreciation methods for oil and gas assets, including single well and gasfield continuous commissioning of new wells, and analyzes the existing issues of production depreciation method from production matching and benefit evaluation results, and puts forward an improved method and finally verifies the effect of the improved method. The results show that:1)shale gas development is characterized by rapid production decline, and the traditional straight-line method for depreciation cannot reflect the principle of “matching revenue and expense”, so the production method should be used to better match production;2)for shale gas fields with obvious replacement production characteristics, the existing production depreciation method cannot accelerate the depreciation, but delay the depreciation calculation, making the economic evaluation result deviate from the actual development benefit, and affect the economic development of large scale shale gas development;3)through the improvement of depreciation rate and depreciation assets, the production method is optimized. The depreciation calculated by the improved production method well matches the production, and the calculated benefit index is also consistent with the actual situation, which can truly reflect the original intention of accelerating depreciation of shale gas assets. It is concluded that the depreciation method of oil and gas assets has an important impact on the economic development of shale gas. The improved production depreciation method has better production matching and economic evaluation results, which is conducive to the economic development of deep shale gas and promote the sound and sustainable development of shale gas industry.