| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Until recently, inadequate transportation infrastructure, along with rancorous arguments about price and a general atmosphere of mutual suspicion have kept Chinese purchases of Russian energy at relatively low levels. But now, with the historic May 21st agreement, the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), the country's largest integrated energy company, and Russian energy giant Gazprom, which controls Russia's export gas pipelines, finally signed a thirty-year, $400 billion deal that will see as much as thirty-eight billion cubic meters (bcm) of Russian gas go to China annually from around 2018 to 2047. Gazprom will send gas pumped from its Kovyktin and Chayandin fields in eastern Siberia to the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei metropolitan area in the north of China and the Yangtze River Delta in the east. The deliveries, which may take a few years to reach full capacity, will provide China with more than one-fifth of its present-day annual consumption of some one hundred and seventy bcm, although Chinese demand for natural gas is expected to rise above two hundred bcm by then.
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