SINGAPORE/LONDON (Reuters) – China’s Beijing Gas Group is set to start trial operation of its first major liquefied natural gas terminal in northern China in October, company officials said, marking the country’s second regasification facility starting online this year.
Beijing Gas has secured three long-term supply and purchase agreements of the super-chilled fuel with a combined volume of more than 2 million tonnes a year, company officials told Reuters.
The contracts include one 10-year agreement with Shell, with shipments starting this year, one official added, without giving further details.
The new terminal, located in the city of Tianjin and connected with Chinese capital Beijing via a 300-km pipeline, is able to handle 5 million tonnes of LNG annually.
Apart from Shell, Beijing Gas has also lined up supplies with China’s state traders CNOOC and Sinochem, according to two separate trading sources.
Municipal government-backed Beijing Gas, the dominant piped gas distributor to the Chinese capital supplying roughly 6% of the Chinese market, is one of the country’s so-called Tier 2 importers behind state energy giants.
Reuters reported on Monday that Zhejiang Energy Group is slated to start trial commissioning late this month of a 3 million tonne-per-year LNG receiving terminal in east China.
($1 = 7.1513 Chinese yuan renminbi)
(Reporting by Chen Aizhu in Singapore and Marwa Rashad in London; Editing by David Evans)
