The pipeline of west-east natural gas piping project passed national completion check and approval recently. It demonstrates that the gas piping project fully starts normal operation and exerts efficiency.

In 1998, the discovery of Kara No.2 Gas field in Tarim Oilfield facilitated the construction of the west-east natural gas piping project, an energy artery crossing over 4000 km in China. It took 4 years and 8 months from implementing the decision to putting the project into production. That is half of the construction period of similar projects at abroad. Since the entire pipeline was put into commercial operation in Oct., 2004, it has been running safely and stably.

Over the past 5 years since the west-east natural gas piping project started production, the accumulative diverted and transported natural gas has taken a half of the national increased gas consumption amount. That allows a deduction of 80.99 mln tons of standard coal and 659 bln kwh of electricity consumption, thus reducing emission of poisonous substances of sulphur dioxide, carbon dioxide and dust by over 3.8 mln tons, and that of carbon dioxide acid gas, 280 mln tons.

Presently, the gas piping project has covered more than 3000 large and medium enterprises in 110-plus cities. The down-stream users of the transported gas have increased to 126, benefiting close to 300 mln people.