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China to start building second major gas pipeline

Business Materials 17 October 2007 08:54 (UTC +04:00)

China will start building a second major natural gas pipeline around the end of the year or in early 2008 to transport the fuel from its remote northwestern regions to the booming coast, a senior government official said yesterday.

China, the world's second-largest energy user and keen to boost use of the fuel to cut pollution, also wants to further increase gas imports, Chen Deming, vice-chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, told the 17th Party Congress.

Chen said the gas line would take gas from resource-rich western regions including Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Shaanxi province to the Pearl River Delta in south China's Guangdong province.

China's top energy group CNPC, operator of the gas line, has said it would eventually link the pipe-line with central Asia's Turkmenistan, with which it has an agreement to import 30 billion cubic metres of gas a year, or 60 per cent of China's current total use.

CNPC's listed arm, PetroChina, operates China's first flagship West-East pipeline connecting gas fields in the Xinjiang region with the financial hub of Shanghai 4,000 kilometres away on the east coast.

China will also accelerate gas production in the Chongqing region and Sichuan province in the southwest, to begin sending more than 12 billion cubic metres of gas to east China within two years, said Chen - the same yearly volume as the firstWest-East project.

China aims to triple its use of gas, which now supplies barely three per cent of its energy, to 200 bcm by 2020. ( Reuters )

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