PetroChina mulls Sichuan pipelines
PetroChina, the nation's largest oil and gas producer, plans to invest more than 10 billion yuan until 2010 on nine gas pipeline construction projects in Sichuan to more than triple its supply to the province.
This comes on the heels of last week's announcement by vice-chairman Jiang Jiemin of a gas find in the province, which he called 'China's largest gas field discovery since the establishment' of the republic in 1949.
The discovery will create demand for transport infrastructure inside and outside the province.
The nine pipeline projects will allow the company to raise its annual gas supply to 20 billion cubic metres from six billion cubic metres at present, Xinhua reported.
PetroChina has earmarked 3.5 billion yuan of spending for a ring-shaped pipeline in northern Sichuan with daily capacity of 12 million cubic metres, the largest in the province. It will replace an ageing pipeline.
Existing supply in the province is about two billion cubic metres short of demand, Xinhua said, quoting an unnamed official at the company's southwest oil and gas subsidiary.
Sichuan is the company's largest gas production region, accounting for 36.1 per cent of gas output.
PetroChina's gas discovery in Longgang could ultimately have proven reserves of 500 billion to 700 billion cubic metres, according to industry publication Upstream, which quoted an unnamed PetroChina official working on the discovery. This equals up to half of its proved reserves of 1.36 trillion cubic metres at the end of 2005.
Another recent discovery by PetroChina, the Nanpu block of Jidong oil field in Tianjin municipality, has probable crude oil reserves of 2.2 billion barrels, which could reach 7.3 billion barrels in five to 10 years, Dow Jones quoted an unnamed Ministry of Land and Resources official as saying.
PetroChina had 11.54 billion barrels of proved reserves at the end of 2005.
A company spokesman declined to confirm the figures, saying more work had to be done to verify them.
