By Wan Zhihong (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-02-23 10:56

Construction of the second west-east natural gas pipeline, costing 142.2 billion yuan, formally began on Friday.

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The 9,102 km project will pipe natural gas from Turkmenistan and the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region to the Yangtze and Pearl River Deltas.

It will traverse 12 provinces and autonomous regions before reaching the eastern municipality of Shanghai and southern Guangdong province.

China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), China's largest oil producer, is behind the project. It says the designed capacity of the pipeline is 30 billion cu m per year.

PetroChina Co Ltd, a listed subsidiary of CNPC, had previously said it would cooperate with another CNPC arm to invest a combined 16 billion yuan building a gas pipeline from China to Turkmenistan.

Under an agreement signed by China and Turkmenistan in 2006, China will pipe 30 billion cu m of natural gas a year from the resource-rich central Asian country, for 30 years.

The first west-east gas pipeline was put into commercial operation at the end of 2004, starting from Tarim Basin in Xinjiang and ending in Shanghai.

The 4,000 km pipeline that crosses 10 provinces, has a designed annual transmission capacity of 12 billion cu m.

China plans to boost natural gas production by 50 percent before 2010 to meet increasing demand

The nation's gas production is expected to be 90 billion cu m in 2010.

Natural gas will then account for 5.3 percent of the nation's total energy consumption.