CNPC: Consumption of natural gas in China to increase 2.5 times by 2020

By 2020, China will increase consumption of natural gas from the current 167 billion cubic meters to 420 billion cubic meters, the senior economist of Institute of Economy and Technologies under CNPC Xu Bo reported to the ITAR-TASS.

“In order to reduce the level of air pollution in our cities, our country intends to significantly increase the level of gas consumption. The Government plans to develop a scheme of dotations to cope with this task, as well as to stimulate the import of LNG to private companies,” - he said.

The expert thinks that it won't be easy to cope with the task. 'It will be good if will import 20 billion cubic meters of gas per year via the pipeline from Russia by 2020. Even at that rate China will have to attract private companies to increase the LNG supplies to the country,” - Xu Bo is sure.

According to him, leading companies of China – Sinopec, CNOOC and CNPC have developed large projects for LNG imports. “But we must increase the LNG import by 5.1 million tons per year to increase the consumption rate to the estimated level. In this case, private companies can help,” - the Chinese expert added.