Some big news in the pipeline

CHINA National Petroleum Corp, the nation's biggest oil company, has started delivering crude from the western Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region to cities in the north through a pipeline that was completed last June.

The first batch of crude supplies was transported to Lanzhou City in northwestern Gansu Province on Wednesday, China National Petroleum, parent of PetroChina Co, said in a statement on its Website yesterday. The link is part of the company's 15-billion-yuan (US$1.98 billion) Western Pipeline project. China, the world's biggest energy user after the United States, is building pipelines to transport supplies from Xinjiang, which holds a third of the nation's oil reserves, to cities, such as Shanghai and Beijing, where demand is rising, Bloomberg News said.

China National Petroleum started constructing the Western Oil pipelines in March 2005, the company said. The project includes a 1,546-kilometer link, which will deliver 20 million tons of crude from Shanshan in Xinjiang to Lanzhou every year and a 1,842-kilometer oil-product pipeline, which has an annual capacity of 10 million tons, it said in the statement.