OREANDA-NEWS. September 11, 2014. China, one of the world's fastest emerging economies, has tripled its production of natural gas over the last 10 years, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said Monday. But the country, whose energy consumption is rising faster than that of any other country in the world, still did not produce enough natural gas to meet its own needs, figures show.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration said the country's production of natural gas reached 107 billion cubic meters in 2012 -- three times the production of a decade earlier. And China's production, apparently, continues to grow. According to the Paris-based International Energy Agency, China produced 40 billion cubic meters of natural gas in 2004 and 117 billion cubic meters in 2013. But the U.S. Energy Information Administration said that last year the country's natural gas consumption reached 161 billion cubic meters, significantly outstripping production. Consumption in the country rose at an average annual rate of 17 percent from 2003 through 2013, reaching nearly 161 billion cubic meters in 2013, U.S. authorities said.

The Chinese government, though, is trying to increase production still further. It is targeting production to reach about 155 billion cubic meters per year by the end of 2015. And it anticipates that natural gas' share of the total energy consumed in China will rise. Most of the anticipated production growth is from large onshore fields in the western and north-central regions of China as well as from offshore deep-water regions in the South China Sea, the U.S. agency said.

Other authorities agree, though they warn of the dangers of increased pollution. "China gives utmost importance to natural gas recently in its energy policy," said Hasan Selim Ozertem, the director of the Ankara-based think tank USAK Center for Energy Security studies. "Rapidly rising energy consumption due to a high rate of growth causes geometric increase of carbon emissions, which leads to air pollution in the metropolises of the country." Ozertem said China had taken important steps in increasing the conventional production of natural gas and is looking for possibilities of exploiting shale gas reserves, as has been done in the United States.

China imported nearly 51 billion cubic meters of liquefied natural gas and pipeline gas in 2013 to fill the growing gap between supply and demand, the U.S. energy authority said. Liquefied natural gas is gas that has been converted to liquid for ease of storage or transport. It takes up far less volume than unconverted gas. Imported natural gas met 32 percent of China's demand for natural gas in 2013, up from 2 percent in 2006, the American agency said. Ozertem said China is cooperating with Central Asian governments so that it will become not only a buyer of gas but a participant in multi-billion-dollar infrastructure projects. In addition, China and Russia finalized a natural gas agreement in May that will allow China to purchase and transport gas from eastern Russia through a proposed pipeline. The deal, valued at approximately \\$400 billion, will supply China with up to 37 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year starting in 2018.