16-06-00 China's huge energy project to pipe gas from west to east, expected to cost as much as the Three Gorges Project, will be launched in early 2001 and should end by 2003. A major gas pipeline with total length of 4,200 km will be built with initial 120-bn yuan investment for the project, according to Huang Yicheng, chairman of the executive council of the China Energy Research Society (CERS).
The project, as the first major component of developing the country's western regions, will start from the Tarim Basin in north-west China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and end in Shanghai, running through the provinces Gansu, Shaanxi, Shanxi, Henan, Anhui and Jiangsu and the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. The project is designed to send gas from the country's major gas production bases in the western and central parts to the economically-developed Yangtze River Delta areas as well as the eastern regions.
Huang said natural gas will play a very important role in the country's energy development strategy for the 21st century, with gas utilisation accounting for 8 % of China's energy consumption instead of the present 2 %. He expects the country's peak annual gas output in the new century to hit between 110 bn and 130 bn cm, with production centring on the rich gas-bearing regions of Xinjiang and Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia.