CHINA National Petroleum Corp, the nation's biggest oil producer, has started allocating resources for two joint ventures to explore for gas and build pipelines in Turkmenistan, it said yesterday.
China National Petroleum set up working groups for Amu Darya River Natural Gas Corp and Sino-Turkmenistan Gas Pipe Corp last Friday, the Beijing-based state oil producer said in its newsletter.
China National Petroleum signed two agreements to buy natural gas from Turkmenistan, it said last month. China, the world's second-largest energy user, is seeking oil and gas to meet the needs of an economy that grew 11.9 percent in second quarter, the fastest in 12 years.
"This marks the official launch of the Sino-Turkmenistan gas projects," it said in yesterday's statement. The Chinese company will operate the projects under the mutual interest, it said, citing Jiang Jiemin, president of China National Petroleum.
Turkmenistan will export 30 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually to China over 30 years, to be shipped through a pipeline that the Central Asian republic and China National Petroleum will build, said Bloomberg News.
China and Turkmenistan will carry out joint exploration and development of gas fields along the Amu Darya River in Turkmenistan near the Turkmen-Uzbek border, Interfax news agency said in April last year.
Turkmenistan, the second-largest natural gas producer in the former Soviet Union, has an estimated 23.1 trillion cubic meters of gas reserves, and plans to produce as much as 240 billion cubic meters a year, Turkmenistan.ru, an online daily, reported in February 2006.
China wants to increase the use of the cleaner-burning fuel to five percent of total energy consumption by 2010 from about three percent now to cut reliance on coal and oil.
China National Petroleum is parent of Hong Kong-listed PetroChina Co.