Officials in Beijing are considering emergency plans to get the capital city through its worst natural gas shortage in 20 years.

"The shortage has given us a lot of food for thought. It is very worrying that much of the city depends on this source of energy and there is only one pipeline," said Mayor Wang Qishan at an annual financial meeting on Tuesday.

An alarm about the energy dearth was sounded on December 31, when the mayor received a report that natural gas reserves stored in neighboring Tianjin Municipality, which is the major gas holding area for Beijing, had dropped to 470 million cubic meters from the original 1.1 billion in early November.

It meant that more than half the gas reserves had been used with more than two-thirds of the heating season to go. Heating in Beijing will be switched off on March 15.

Beijing has used about 22 million cubic meters of natural gas every day this winter, said Li Jianzhong, a researcher with the Petroleum Exploration and Development Research Institute of PetroChina.

More than 95 percent of the city's natural gas is provided by a single pipeline from northwest China's Shaanxi Province, which can pump only 10.3 million cubic meters a day year-round. In spring and summer, when demand plummets, the surplus is stored in Tianjin for winter use.

Wang Qishan said that if consumption remains high, gas supplies will be insufficient to meet the needs of the upcoming Spring Festival and the annual sessions of the National People's Congress and Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

These sessions, in March, are among the most important political events in China.

In response to the crisis, the city has drawn up an emergency plan, halting or reducing supplies of natural gas for industrial use and replacing more than 1,300 natural-gas-powered buses with oil-fueled ones.

Wang said that the municipal government began preparing in August for the winter's energy needs. However, the government had failed to take into account the new gas-fueled boilers in the suburbs and in new residential estates, he said.

To reduce air pollution, the capital city has been replacing coal-burning boilers with gas-fueled ones since the late 1990s.

"A banker once told me that the devil lies in the details. Now I fully understand the saying. The cause of the energy shortfall this time lies in the details," said Wang.

"A vice mayor and I made a 'ridiculous' decision on the night of January 10 to check the gas meters of every boiler in the city's eight urban districts. After eight days, we found that real gas consumption as shown by the meters was nowhere near that reported by the district governments. Yet the real figure is critical for decision-making."

(China Daily January 20, 2005)