Updated: 2006-03-04 08:31
Sinopec, China's biggest oil refiner, said it planned to build two crude oil importing facilities in North China's Tangshan, involving a total investment of 6 billion yuan (US$739.8 million).
The project includes two oil berths and various supporting infrastructure facilities including pipelines and oil tanks.
The company has already submitted the proposal to build one berth to the central government, a director surnamed Liu told China Daily.
"We are still not sure when to expect the final approval, but shall be building the two berths one by one," Liu said.
The director said one oil berth and its supporting facilities would cost about 3 billion yuan (US$369.9 million), but he added that Sinopec has not decided to build the project on its own.
"It is still at a very preliminary phase," he said.
Local media reported that the oil importing project would be one of the key projects for Sinopec in its five-year development plan.
The new project will be located at Caofeidian, south of Tangshan city on the coast of North China's Hebei Province.
The provincial government of Hebei expects Caofeidian to be a new industrial base, with its resources of oil, gas and steel driving the fast-growing regional economy, primarily driven by Beijing and Tianjin.
Sinopec's domestic rival, the nation's largest oil producer PetroChina, also plans to build a significant energy project, a LNG (liquefied natural gas) terminal for gas imports in order to meet surging demand in the area.
An unnamed PetroChina senior official earlier told China Daily that the National Development and Reform Commission has given the Beijing-based oil giant an initial go-ahead to conduct a feasibility study of the project.
The LNG terminal is scheduled to start supplying 8 billion cubic metres of imported natural gas to users in North China and Beijing by 2008, earlier sources said.
But as world crude oil prices remain high, industry insiders say the planned LNG terminals in China might be delayed in their start-up operations because of possible disagreements over gas prices with the suppliers.
"The high energy prices might be a factor putting off the already-planned LNG terminals along the eastern coast," said Liu Hequn, vice-president of the planning institute with China National Petroleum Corp, which is PetroChina's unlisted parent company.
The country's top offshore oil producer, China National Offshore Oil Corp, is confronted with disagreements over prices in their bid to secure gas supplies from Indonesia's BP-led Tangguh project, for their Fujian based LNG terminal.
A PetroChina spokesman on Friday refused to comment on whether their LNG projects, which also involves Jiangsu and Liaoning provinces, would be postponed by the high gas prices.
China last year purchased 127 million tons of crude oil from foreign countries, a year-on-year increase of 3.3 per cent, according to official data. At the same time it produced 48 million tons of natural gas domestically.
