MEP: Less than 1% Residential Gas Blackout in Rural Area

On February 27, MEP (Ministry of Environmental Protection of P.R. China) held the regular press conference. Liu Binjiang, director of the Atmosphere Environment Management Department, said, “According to a large-scale investigation involved over 2,000 interviewers and over 25,000 villages and communities with coal-to-gas or coal-to-electricity reform in Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei, the results showed that there was only less than 1% of villages in the rural areas being influenced by the residential gas supply shortage in this winter heating season.”

In 2017, over 3.94 million households in the 2+26 cities in North China completed the replacing-coal upgrades, and over 10 million tons of bulk coal burning was replaced with clean energy. Herein, 70% of the upgrades changed to gas-fueled heating. In the industrial field, over 62,000 enterprises were shut down due to their air pollution problems.

However, Liu also agreed that the supply deficit of the natural gas had serious impacts on the coal-to-gas reform, as well as the limited coverage of the sub-pipeline grid and the poor implementation in draining industrial use to guarantee residential use. Both of the natural gas supply and reserve mechanism and the natural gas pricing mechanism request deeper reform urgently.

In the conference, the implementation of the coal-to-gas reform is confirmed again as the most important national strategy and will be further and deeper executed in 2018 and beyond. MEP shows their strong ambition and confidence to promote the NDRC’s Clean Winter Heating Schedule and return residents a more blue sky in the future.

Moreover, according to CNPC’s estimation, over 3 million households and over 50,000 T/h of boilers will be upgraded to natural gas, and the total natural gas consumption will increase by 32 bcm or 13.5% Y-O-Y in 2018. The supply will continue to be the first factors restricting the consumption in the foreseeable future, and the natural gas industry will remain in the tight-balance pattern. Hence, the LNG import and storage infrastructure, as the quickest way to increase the supply capacity, will embrace a much brighter future in upcoming years.