CNPC assures enough gas for heating season

China National Petroleum Corporation, the country's largest oil and gas producer by annual output, said it will continue to maximize production at domestic gas fields while ensuring adequate gas imports to ensure sufficient supplies for the upcoming heating season.

The company, which is better known as PetroChina, is the biggest supplier of gas in China, accounting for more than 70 percent of the total. It plans to produce more than 128 billion cubic meters of natural gas this year.

It will supply 98.67 billion cubic meters of gas, sourced from home and abroad, during the upcoming heating season. That will mark an increase of 10 billion cubic meters from the same period last year.

CNPC said its gas production during the first three quarters of this year exceeded 95 billion cubic meters, up 8.4 percent year-on-year.

All of the company's gas storage tanks have finished injection. As much as 12.4 billion cubic meters of gas are available during the upcoming winter and spring, 1.6 billion cubic meters, or 14.8 percent, more than the same period of previous year.

What distinguishes this year is higher storage level and slower gas imports, reducing the country's dependency on foreign supplies, said Li Ziyue, an analyst with BloombergNEF.

Soaring demand for liquefied natural gas, the slow construction of pipelines to import more supply and the lack of gas storage facilities have contributed to the country's gas shortage in previous years, despite a global supply glut of natural gas.

According to Li Li, energy research director at energy consulting firm ICIS China, the industrial use of gas might not be as much as the previous years due to COVID-19, which will in turn ensure sufficient gas supply for residential heating.

In addition, construction of infrastructure facilities, including gas storage tanks and import terminals, has been improving in recent years, thanks to the coal-to-gas switching policy directives to curb air pollution, and large-scale replacement of coal-fired heating with gas-fired boilers in domestic households, which will further ensure gas supply, she said.

According to CNPC, gas imported from abroad also plays a major role in ensuring sufficient supplies of heating fuel. The company has been consistently negotiating with international peers including Shell, ExxonMobil and Qatar Liquefied Gas Company to ensure stable gas supply.

The China-Russia East natural gas pipeline is expected to achieve a capacity of 28 million cubic meters per day by January, from the current 14 million cubic meters per day, to pump sufficient gas to the world's second-largest economy, it said.

The China-Central Asia gas pipeline and the China-Myanmar gas pipeline, the biggest investment by CNPC in Myanmar as well as the first large-scale oil and gas pipeline facility across the entire territory of Myanmar, have all helped ensure energy security of China while creating an energy channel that benefits the peoples of both Myanmar and China.

According to CNPC, the company's three LNG terminals at Dalian, Tangshan and Jiangsu have witnessed a peak gas throughput of 100 million cubic meters per day.

This should meet peak demand in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the Yangtze River Delta region and the country's northeastern regions, PetroChina said.