OREANDA-NEWS. December 25, 2013. State-owned PetroChina started commercial operations at its new 3.5 million mt/year Tangshan LNG import terminal in northeastern Hebei province Tuesday, the company said.

The terminal started receiving LNG in November.

According to the Platts cFlow shiptracking software, the Al Gharrafa LNG vessel arrived from Ras Laffan, Qatar, at the Caofeidian port in Tangshan on November 15. The Qatargas-owned Q-Flex vessel, which has a capacity of 216,000 cubic meters, left Tangshan on November 25 and is headed to Fujairah, according to cFlow.

The Tangshan LNG facility has one jetty to accommodate 80,000-270,000 cu m LNG ships and four storage tanks that each hold up to 160,000 cu m. Construction started in March 2011. A second-phase expansion will increase total capacity to 10 million mt/year.

PetroChina said the facility would send about 1.28 billion cu m gas over the coming winter and spring to Hebei, Beijing and Tianjin through the Yongtangqin gas pipeline, helping to ease Beijing's tight gas supply. It said Beijing would have 7 billion cu m in gas demand over the winter heating season.

The import terminal is co-owned by PetroChina, Beijing Enterprises Group and Hebei Natural Gas Company, but PetroChina did not give the breakdown of shares.

Tangshan is PetroChina's third LNG import facility, after the 3.2 million mt/year Dalian project in northeastern Liaoning province and the 3.2 million mt/year Rudong project in eastern Jiangsu province.

China National Offshore Oil Corp. operates the country's other six LNG terminals. Those include the 6.7 million mt/year Dapeng LNG and the recently started 3.5 million mt/year Zhuhai LNG in southern Guangdong province, the 6 million mt/year Fujian LNG in southeastern Fujian province, the 3 million mt/year Shanghai LNG in eastern Shanghai, the 3 million mt/year Zhejiang LNG in eastern Zhejiang province, and the 2.2 million mt/year Tianjin floating storage and regasification unit in northern Tianjin.