Report: China to begin building gas pipeline

China National Petroleum Corporation the country’s biggest onshore oil and gas producer, will begin building a second west-to-east natural gas pipeline in 2008, a state media report said today.

The pipeline will run 4,000 miles from Xinjiang, an oil and gas-rich region in the north-west, to southern, industrialised Guangdong province, the Shanghai Securities News reported.

The pipeline will carry 30 billion cubic meters of gas a year and would be completed by 2010, the newspaper cited Xue Zhenkui, director of the China Petroleum Pipeline Scientific Research Institute, as saying.

CNPC already has a west-east gas pipeline running from Xinjiang to Shanghai. The two pipelines would be connected, forming the backbone of a 100 billion yuan (€9.65bn) national natural gas network, the report said.