BEIJING, April 18 (RIA Novosti) - Kazakhstan and China are looking at three possibilities for natural gas supplies from the gas-rich former Soviet republic to the energy-hungry Asian giant, a Kazakh expert said Tuesday.
"China has expressed serious interest in future supplies of natural gas from Kazakhstan," Marian Abisheva, deputy director of the Institute for Strategic Studies, said in the text of a speech distributed at an international conference in the Chinese capital.
She said the options included the expansion of the existing pipeline between the Uzbek cities of Bukhara and Tashkent to the Kazakh commercial capital, Almaty, via Taldy-Kurgan in Kazakhstan to Alashankou on the border with China.
Another option is construction of a new gas pipeline connecting Ishim in Russia's western Siberia and Alashankou through the Kazakh cities of Astana and Karaganda, while the third is building a pipeline from Chelkar in western Kazakhstan through Kyzyl-Orda to Shimkent where it would connect to the Bukhara-Tashkent-Almaty pipeline.
"Transportation of natural gas from western Kazakhstan to China is very promising," Abisheva said.
China's growing economy is constantly searching for new energy supplies. Russian energy giant Gazprom and China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) are in talks on construction of two gas pipelines from western and eastern Siberia to China to deliver 30-40 billion cubic meters of natural gas each annually starting in 2011.
