CHINA seeks to increase its oil-processing capacity to 600 million tons in 2015, or 12.5 million barrels a day, under a five-year plan for the petrochemical industry.

That's up 25 percent from the 10 million barrels of daily capacity that the Paris-based International Energy Agency estimated China held in 2011.

The nation's average refinery size will rise to at least 6 million tons a year by 2015, according to the plan published by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on its website yesterday.