PetroChina, China's largest oil and gas producer, said the test run of a 65-kilometer cross-border pipeline has been successful, a step away from formally launching the much more efficient and cost-saving crude oil pipeline from Russia to China.

The first shipment, after traveling 13 hours over swaths of virgin forests and frigid soil from Russia's Dzhalinda, entered oil storage in Mohe, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, at around 8 a.m. Tuesday, PetroChina officials said.

The oil will be shipped further down the pipeline to Daqing, China's key crude producing and refining base, where 18 storage tanks with a holding capacity of 100,000 cubic meters were set aside for the Russian crude shipment, said Ma Zhixiang, a PetroChina official who oversees the pipeline project.

Rosnef, Russia's largest oil compnay, is PetroChina's partner for the project.

Ma said monthly crude shipments through the China-Russia pipeline are forecast to range from 250,000 to 300,000 tons during the test run period from November to December. The pipeline is designed to transport 150 million tons of crude oil per year from 2011 to 2030, though it is able to ship twice the amount when it runs at full capacity, he added.

The pipeline, replacing railways to become the prime transport of Russian crude oil to China, will greatly boost bilateral trade, which helps diversify the markets of an energy-rich Russia and the source of China's energy imports, analysts said.

China, the world's second largest economy by certain standards, relied on imports to meet its 388 million tons of crude oil consumption needs in 2009, official data indicates.

Angola, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia top China's crude oil import sources in the first eight months this year, statistics from customs officials show.

On the other hand, Russia has been largely dependent on European consumers for its oil export and is seeking alternative markets.

"China-Russia energy trade has entered a new phrase," said Song Kui, a researcher with the Academy of Social Sciences of Heilongjiang. He said negotiations for laying a crude oil pipeline across the China-Russia border started 14 years ago and has drawn the leaders' attention from both Beijing and Moscow.

The pipeline is part of Russia's 4000-km East Siberia to Pacific Ocean Pipeline Shipment project. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin told reporters in August that Moscow aims to provide 30 million tons of crude oil to the Asia-Pacific region per year and plans to raise that amount to 50 million tons per year in the future.