Long‐term design and planning of shale gas field development is challenging due to the complex development operations and a wide range of candidate locations. In this work, we focus on the multi‐period shale gas field development problem, where the shale gas field has multiple formations and each well can be developed from one of several alternative pads. The decisions in this problem involve the design of the shale gas network and the planning of development operations. A mixed‐integer linear programming (MILP) model is proposed to address this problem. Since the proposed model is a large‐scale MILP, we propose a solution pool‐based bilevel decomposition algorithm to solve it. Results on realistic instances demonstrate the value of the proposed model and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.