China Plans to Raise Imports of Natural Gas

China plans new imports of liquefied natural gas to alleviate widespread shortages, a senior government official said, part of emergency measures to address an unexpected cold snap that is straining the country’s already tight gas supplies.

China is increasing imports of liquified natural gas in a bid to ease widespread shortages this winter. Above, a worker moves a canister of compressed gas.

PetroChina Co., China’s biggest oil producer by volume, will import at least 700 million cubic meters of LNG from the spot market, Zhang Guobao, director of the National Energy Administration, was quoted as saying by Chinese television Wednesday. That is more than China imported in October. PetroChina and the country’s two other big state-owned oil companies are also increasing production of gas and shifting supplies to urban residents from industrial users.

Natural-gas demand has soared in recent weeks due to low temperatures, rain and unusually early snowfall since the start of November. That has triggered severe tight supplies of gas — widely used for heating and cooking — in cities from Wuhan in central China to Chongqing in the west to Nanjing near the east coast.

Some Chinese cities have already started curtailing gas supplies to certain businesses. The government of Hangzhou, a city of more than six million people west of Shanghai, stopped natural-gas supplies to entertainment businesses this past weekend, and reduced supplies to hotels, office buildings and shopping malls by 20%, the state-run Xinhua news agency said.

The peak season for gas consumption in China is usually December to January, during which northern China is expected to face a gas shortfall of eight million cubic meters a day, and southern China will be short five million to six million cubic meters a day, an official from China National Petroleum Corp., PetroChina’s parent company, said this week.

The National Development and Reform Commission echoed those concerns, saying that gas shortages will likely persist in the near future despite emergency measures.

The planned new imports far exceed China’s total LNG imports in October, which amounted to 433,946 metric tons, or about 570 million cubic meters, according to customs data. The imports would be the first for PetroChina, which is building several LNG-receiving terminals but hasn’t completed any yet. To accommodate the planned shipments, PetroChina will lease a Shanghai LNG liquefied natural-gas terminal from China National Offshore Oil Corp., another of the big three oil companies.

The LNG from those shipments will be supplied to Shanghai and key export manufacturing provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangsu, as well as Fujian province in the southeast, according to Mr. Zhang of the National Development and Reform Commission.

PetroChina is also raising gas supplies through pipelines to the domestic market to as much as 200 million cubic meters a day, its parent company said in its official newsletter.

China’s West-East pipeline is shipping gas at a rate of 17 billion cubic meters a year, or 46.6 million cubic meters a day, even though its designed annual capacity is only 12 billion cubic meters, China National Petroleum said.
—Jing Yang and Wan Xu contributed to this article.