OREANDA-NEWS. February 12, 2014. China Petrochemical Corp., Asia’s biggest refiner, made a “strategic breakthrough” in shale gas exploration in southwest China’s Sichuan province.

The company also had a significant advance in shale gas exploration technologies, Chairman Fu Chengyu said in a statement on the company’s official microblog at Sina.com amid its annual work conference in Beijing from Jan. 20 to 22. The new technologies have been applied in the Sichuan project, Fu said, without elaborating.

China Petrochemical may produce as much as 550,000 cubic meters of shale gas a day from its fields in Sichuan’s Fuling, according to a Jan. 15 report from the research arm of China National Petroleum Corp., the country’s biggest oil and gas explorer.

Southwest China, which includes Sichuan, and the Upper Yangtze River area account for 40 percent of the country’s estimated 25.08 trillion cubic meters of shale gas reserves, the world’s largest, according to the Ministry of Land and Resources. China aims to produce 6.5 billion cubic meters of shale gas by 2015 and as much as 100 billion cubic meters by 2020, from almost zero commercial output in 2013.

China Petrochemical will scale back investment in 2014 and focus on improving returns and efficiency of current projects, Fu said. The company will “deepen all-around reforms internally” and work to streamline management mechanisms at its domestic and overseas units, he said, without elaborating.