China has so far received 30 billion cubic meters of gas from Turkmenistan since deliveries started in December 2009, state-owned China National Petroleum Corp. said Monday.
Of this, 10.7 Bcm came from CNPC's Bagtyyarlyk field on the right bank of the Amu Darya river in Turkmenistan, while the rest came from other Turkmen fields, CNPC said.
Development of the Amu Darya area, where CNPC has a production sharing contract with the Turkmen government, was going on and it will provide 13 Bcm/year of gas to the pipeline network by 2014, CNPC added.
Both CNPC and state-owned Turkmengaz signed a sales and purchase agreement in July 2007 for 30 Bcm/year of Turkmen gas. In 2008, the two companies agreed to boost the volume to 40 Bcm/year by 2015.
CNPC's listed subsidiary PetroChina said it imported 15.5 Bcm of gas from Turkmenistan in 2011, more than triple the volume in 2010. It is targeting to import 24.1 Bcm this year.
The gas is delivered via the Central Asia-China pipeline network which cuts through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan before reaching the Chinese border at Xinjiang province. From there the pipeline links to the 8,653 km (5,377 miles) Second West-East pipeline, which transports the gas to various parts of eastern China.
China's increasing reliance on Central Asian gas is partly why gas sales negotiations with Russia have made little progress since a memorandum of understanding was inked in 2006. Under the MOU, they agreed to construct two pipelines to transport a total of 68 Bcm/year of Russian gas via the western Altai route and the rest from East Siberia via an eastern route from 2015.
Price has remained the key sticking point for CNPC, which fears it will lose significant amounts of money by importing Russian gas, which could be more expensive than Turkmen gas.
The latest round of the Russia-China energy dialogue took place in Beijing on Friday, with CNPC and Russian gas company Gazprom pledging broader cooperation, although no breakthrough on price was reached. Moreover Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich had told Russian media on Thursday that he did not expect Moscow and Beijing to reach an agreement on a price for Russian gas supplies during President Vladimir Putin's June visit to Beijing this week for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit. The Russian delegation will include representatives from Gazprom.
