A senior officer with China United Coalbed Methane Corporation Ltd. (China CBM) said on Thursday that China plans to build two pipelines for coalbed gas transmission in the next five years.

 

Hu Aimei, vice president of China CBM, said at a forum on natural gas, coal and power that the first pipeline, linking Qinshui County of North China's Shanxi Province to Boai County of Henan Province, will be connected to the great pipeline pumping natural gas from energy-rich West China to East China.

 

The pipeline is designed to have an annual gas transmission capacity of one billion cubic meters.

 

The second one will transmit coalbed gas from Songzao of southwestern Chongqing Municipality to feed the energy demand of the urban people of Chongqing, said Hu.

 

Still under planning, the two pipelines have not got the formal permission of the state government, she said.

 

Over 46 percent of China's coal mines are rich in gas and over 1.3 billion cubic meters of gas are being emitted each year without getting effective use.

 

Coalbed gas is not only an effective alternative energy source for China, the mining and use of it could also be helpful to avoid coal mine accidents as well as reducing the emission of methane, a major type of greenhouse gas, said Hu.

 

China boasts 37 trillion cubic-meter reserves of coal-bed methane, the third largest in the world, next only to Russia and Canada. Sixty percent of the gas is stored in coal beds over 1,500 meters deep, easy to be mined and developed.

 

However, with an annual output of 100 million cubic meters, China's development of coalbed gas still remains at a low level.

 

The Chinese government is attaching more attention to the development of coalbed gas from 2006 to 2010, said Hu.

 

China plans to increase its annual coalbed gas output to 10 billion cubic meters in 2010 and 40 billion cubic meters in 2020.

 

A compulsory index system for the minimum collection of coalbed gas when producing one-ton of coal is being constituted by the government, said Hu. "It will be issued soon," she said.

 

(Xinhua News Agency March 31, 2006)