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Pipelines deliver clean energy
By Wan Zhihong (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-03-02 07:57

 Pipelines deliver clean energy

Workers at a construction site in Luoyang, Henan province that is part of China's West-East gas pipeline project.[China Daily]

Liu Fang, a Shanghai resident, usually prepares breakfast for her family at 7 in the morning. "I can easily finish my cooking in 10 minutes using natural gas," said the 50-year-old housewife.

The gas Liu cooks with comes from the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, about 4,000 km to the west.

The Liu family is one of the more than 4 million households in Shanghai benefiting from China's first West-East gas transmission pipeline, completed in 2004.

The 4,000-km project crosses 10 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities, linking Xinjiang's gas-rich Tarim Basin to Shanghai.

The line has a designed capacity of 12 billion cu m a year and provides natural gas, which can be a relatively clean source of energy, to over 200 million people in China.

China started building the country's second West-East gas pipeline, the largest of its kind in the world, in 2008. The project included one trunk line and eight sub-lines, with a total length of 9,102 km, and 142.2 billion yuan of investment.

The project will cross 14 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities. It will carry 30 million cu m of natural gas every year from Central Asia and Xinjiang to eastern and western areas including Shanghai and Guangdong.

The pipeline will greatly boost natural gas consumption in China, said Wu Hong, an official with China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC), builder of the project. "Once the project comes into operation in 2011, China will raise the ratio of natural gas in its total primary energy consumption by 1 to 2 percentage point."


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