Turkmenistan, Ashgabat, July 25 / Trend H. Hasanov /
The next meeting of the intergovernmental Turkmen-Chinese Cooperation Committee and its subcommittee on energy and cultural cooperation will be held in Beijing from July 25-28, 2012, an official Turkmen source said on Wednesday.
Ashgabat will be represented by Baymurad Hojamuhammedov, deputy prime minister, who is responsible for the Turkmen oil and gas, chemical and fishery complex.
Turkmenistan is China's major gas supplier in Central Asia. The pipeline was commissioned through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan in December 2009. The project was China's first energy corridor designed to import foreign natural gas.
The design capacity of the Central-Asian gas pipeline is 30 billion cubic meters. It was built by CNPC. This allowed Turkmenistan to expand its sales markets limited by the supplies to Russia and Iran.
A framework agreement on cooperation to transport additional amounts of natural gas from Turkmenistan to China was signed between the state concern Turkmengaz and the China National Petroleum Corporation in Beijing in early June.
According to the document, the volume of Turkmen natural gas delivered to China each year will reach up to 65 billion cubic meters.
According to experts from both countries, the volume of Turkmen natural gas delivered to China will reach 30 billion cubic meters from early 2010 to July 1, 2012. This figure will rise up to 44 billion cubic meters by late 2012.
CNPC operates in Turkmenistan on the basis of the exclusive Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) to develop the onshore field of Bagtyyarlyk in the Lebap region of the country. The Turkmen government signed all the other PSAs with foreign companies only on offshore blocks in the Caspian Sea.