PetroChina Co, the country's biggest energy producer, will build underground natural-gas storage tanks in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region to guard against supply disruptions.

Construction of the 4 billion cubic-meter Hutubi storage base will begin "soon," parent China National Petroleum Corp said in its online newsletter yesterday. PetroChina will start filling the tanks in June next year, CNPC said. Hutubi will be the first storage complex on the nation's second West-East pipeline that's linked to Central Asia, CNPC said.

China is building oil and gas stockpiles as demand surges in the world's fastest-growing major economy. The nation aims to double the use of gas to about 8 percent of energy consumption by 2015 to help cut reliance on more polluting oil and coal.

The Hutubi base will be completed in four years in two phases, CNPC said.

CNPC plans to build 10 gas storage tanks by 2015, Caijing magazine said on February 25, 2010. The tanks will be able to hold 22.4 billion cubic meters of gas, as much as 10 percent of the company's total sales, Caijing cited Vice President Liao Yongyuan as saying.