The nation's largest oil producer, PetroChina Co, plans to complete the 102-billion-yuan (US$13.6-billion) second west-east natural gas pipeline by 2010.

The fast-track tack is to satisfy China's rising demand for cleaner forms of energy, Bloomberg News reported.

The Beijing-based company plans to start building the pipeline next year, Zhang Yaoming, chief accountant for PetroChina's natural gas and pipelines division, said during an online forum yesterday. On the same forum, PetroChina said it plans to increase its capacity to process crude oil by 52 percent by 2010.

Refining capacity may increase to 170 million metric tons a year by the end of the decade from 111.7 million tons at the end of 2006, Yang Xin, chief accountant at PetroChina's refining and sales division, said during the forum.

China, the world's second-biggest energy consumer, plans to increase the use of natural gas to 5.3 percent of total energy consumption by 2010 from about three percent now to cut pollution and reliance on oil and coal. PetroChina has signed a 30-year agreement with Turkmenistan to buy 17 billion cubic meters of gas annually, Chairman Jiang Jiemin said in August.

(Shanghai Daily October 26, 2007)