PetroChina has started to lay a 1,200-km (745 miles) pipeline to move refined oil from China's northwest to consumers in the southwest. It's China's longest oil products pipeline. PetroChina would invest nearly four billion yuan ($480 million) in the pipeline. The project is expected be completed and put into operation in June, 2002.
The project was designed to pipe five million tonnes of oil a year (102,700 bpd) from Lanzhou in northwest Gansu province to the city of Chengdu and Chongqing in China's most populous Sichuan province in the first phase. Capacity would be expanded to 10 million tonnes a year at the final stage. The pipeline would be used mainly to move diesel and gasoline, but it could also carry jet fuel and naphtha.The pipeline, when completed, was also seen boosting refinery throughputs at Petrochina's refineries in the northwest, especially the 113,000 bpd Lanzhou Refining & Chemical Corp. Petrochina, which runs refineries and oilfields in China's north and west, has to move surplus oil products to the consuming areas in the south. 
The construction of Lanzhou to Chengdu and Chongqing oil pipeline, a State key construction project started. The distance of the oil pipeline invested and built by China Oil and Gas Co Ltd is some 1200 km passing over 30 counties and cities in Gansu, Shaanxi and Chongqing with an annual oil delivering capacity of more than 5m tons. It is expected that the project will be completed and put into operation in June, 2002. The completion of this long distant oil pipeline project will provide a major passage to deliver oil products from the northwest region to the southwest region and alleviate the tight situation of oil product supply and railway transportation in the southwest region of the country.  The line starts from Lanzhou, the capital of northwestern China's Gansu province, and will end in Chongqing city via Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in southwest. The Sichuan section of the pipeline (from Chengdu to Chongqing) began construction in July last year. Work on the remaining portion will start this year. The line will move oil products produced by PetroChina's Lanzhou Petrochemical Corp. to markets in Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan provinces and Chongqing City.  Demand in those areas reached 7.8 million tonnes at end 2000, but only 200,000 tonnes of oil products were produced in the region. The company hopes the pipeline will help raise the operation rate of Lanzhou Petrochemical, while easing the supply squeeze in the southwest. 
