Workers on Monday completed a tunnel under China's Yangtze River for a major gas pipeline that will run from the southwest province of Sichuan to Shanghai in east China.
With a diameter of 3.08 meters and a length of 1,405 meters, the tunnel laid about 20 meters beneath the riverbed, connecting two gas wells on each bank of the Yangtze in the section of Yichang City, Hubei Province, said Liu Juzheng, head of the Hubei section of the Sichuan-Shanghai pipeline.
The 2,203-km pipeline, with the mainline extending 1,700 km, is another "energy artery" to fuel the booming but energy-insufficient eastern areas following the first West-East gas project.
The pipeline is expected to channel 12 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually from Sichuan's Puguang gas field to central and eastern regions, including Chongqing Municipality, the provinces of Hubei, Anhui, Jiangxi, Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and Shanghai.
The tunnel, which took 325 days to finish, is the first of five to cross under the Yangtze, which originates in Qinghai Province and empties into the East China Sea near Shanghai.
In accordance with the construction plan, the remainder four tunnels of the new gas pipeline will cross under the Yangtze at Zhongxian County of Chongqing, Wuhan and Huangshi in Hubei Province, and Anqing in Anhui Province.
Industry experts said the new gas pipeline, with an investment of 62.7 billion yuan (8.25 billion U.S. dollars), offers an opportunity to the country's underdeveloped west to tap its advantage in resources for development.
Workers have so far laid 500 km of the 2,203-km pipeline project.
The pipeline is scheduled to be completed by late 2010 and the gas is expected to help reduce carbon dioxide emissions by tens of millions of tons annually, said Chen Deming, Vice Minister of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC).
Proven reserves of the Puguang gas field stood at 356.1 billion cubic meters, according to China Petrochemical Corporation (Sinopec).
Puguang gas field will be capable of producing 12 billion cubic meters of purified gas by 2010, equivalent to 10 million tons of standard coal annually.
China's proven reserves of natural gas total 2.66 trillion cubic meters. The government has been promoting the use of natural gas to improve energy efficiency and cut air pollution.
Under an NDRC proposal on natural gas development, China aims to increase its natural gas pipeline network to 44,000 kilometers by 2010 to meet demand.
Although China's natural gas output will reach 94 billion cubic meters in 2010 from 58.6 billion in 2006, the country would still need imports to fill a gap of 16 billion cubic meters yearly.
In Shanghai, demand for natural gas soared from four million cu m in 2003 to 1.9 billion cu m in 2005.
In 2004, China National Petroleum Corp. launched its West-East gas pipeline, which runs more than 4,000 kilometers and channels 1.2 billion cubic meters of gas annually to Shanghai from the Tarim Basin in west China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
CNPC is to build a second West-East pipeline to carry gas imported from Central Asia to the Pearl River and Yangtze River deltas. Construction will begin in 2008 and be operational in 2010. The designed annual gas transmission capacity will be 30 billion cubic meters.